Tag: christmas

Praise the Lord!

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
The time between December 25 and January 5 are the 12 days of Christmas, and they are to be a great celebration because King Jesus has come and he is the rightful Sovereign over all creation.  We are to intentionally enter into the meaning of Christ’s incarnation.  We affirm the identity of Jesus as both full human and fully divine.  Beginning with Christ’s birth, we reflect on the meaning of Christ’s life and prepare for the Lenten journey toward the cross and the empty tomb.
 
            Christmas means that we praise the Lord.  Not just us, but we praise God with all creation.  Everything outside our earth is to give God glory.  Everything in the universe points to a God who is worthy to be praised.  New York Pastor Tim Keller once said that when he was a child a Sunday school teacher changed his life with a simple illustration.  The teacher said, “Let’s assume the distance between the earth and the sun (92 million miles) was reduced to the thickness of this sheet of paper. If that is the case, then the distance between the earth and the nearest star would be a stack of papers 70 feet high. And the diameter of the galaxy would be a stack of papers 310 miles high.”  Then Keller’s teacher added, “The galaxy is just a speck of dust in the universe, yet Jesus holds the universe together by the word of his power.”  Finally, the teacher asked her students, “Now, is this the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?”
 
            We serve a big God who is worthy to be praised, not only out there in the universe but here on earth.  The entire earth is to echo the adoration of God.  That means everything and everyone on earth – fish, animals, birds, and people.  Research in the field of bioacoustics has revealed that every day we are surrounded by millions of ultrasonic songs. For example, the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant.  Whale songs can travel thousands of miles underwater.  Meadowlarks have a range of three hundred notes. Supersensitive sound instruments have discovered that even earthworms make faint staccato sounds! Arnold Summerfield, a German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom (which emits one hundred frequencies) is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits eighty-eight frequencies.  Science writer Lewis Thomas summed it up it this way: “If we had better hearing, and could discern the [singing] of sea birds, the rhythmic [drumming] of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of [flies] hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”
 
            Praise the Lord!  All creation is called to praise God as one great huge choir.  Praise is to occur with both words and actions.  With words, praise is an expression of gratitude to God for who he is and what he has done.  With actions, praise is a posture of submission and an acknowledgement of dependence.
 
            Therefore, testimony is important to the gathered church because through testimony we declare what God has done in our lives and how he is worthy to be praised and obeyed. Yet, praise is not just for the joyful; it is to happen no matter the circumstances because our happiness is not dependent upon positive situations but rather upon the person and work of Jesus.  It may not be easy to find our voice of praise along with everyone else, but we are not alone.  We can choose to join with all creation to praise the name of the Lord. 
 
My wife, who recently had two spine surgeries, said this:  “I am thankful for a chance to get out of the house. Of course my walker was with me.  I am amazed how quickly folks move over, slow down, and give me space when I am out with that thing….  At church it feels like I’m parting the Red Sea! The reason I hate the walker is because it says to the whole world, ‘Hey, I’m broken!’  I realize we all have areas that we are broken, most of them we can hide or cover up. Why are we so ashamed to confess the truth? Who really has it all together? I know we love our privacy and shun pity. However, I have been shown so much grace, kindness, and compassion as I push this piece of aluminum around that I hope this experience continues to change me for the better. I hope in the future I will be sensitive to those who are broken on the inside as well as the outside. May the love of Christ give me eyes to see people as he does, precious and accepted, just as they are.”
 
That word of testimony is the reasonable and logical end for the church of praising the Lord – to connect what God has done and is doing with what he can do through us as we glorify his name.  By simply being who we are created to be, we praise the Lord along with all creation.  When we as people created in God’s image, reflect that image in how we talk and how we live, we participate with the universe in declaring that God is good.  Praise is to be the comprehensive glue that binds every person, family, and ministry of the church together.
 

 

Whether you feel like it, or struggle to say it and live it, we are all to praise the Lord along with everything in the universe because we serve a God who keeps us close to his heart.  Praise the Lord!

1 John 1:1-9

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            It is day three in the twelve days of Christmas.  In the Church Calendar, Christmas in not only one day in which we celebrate the birth of Christ, but a season between December 25 and January 5 in which Christians express their joy over the incarnation of Jesus.  It is an intentional time of affirming the wonderful truth that Jesus is fully man and fully God; that Jesus has gone before us and brought salvation; that in Jesus our sins are forgiven.  And that, my friends, is reason to spend twelve days in celebration.  God has graciously come to earth for our deliverance from sin, death, and hell.
             The Apostle John began his first epistle telling us the reason he writes about Jesus is to make our joy complete.  With Jesus the light, the good news, has come.  If we enter the light and walk in the light, eschewing the darkness, we participate and have fellowship with God through Jesus.  Through Jesus, if we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all that is unrighteous and of the darkness.
             As a pastor who leads worship in a more liturgically oriented church, the gospel of Jesus is presented each and every Sunday through the liturgy.  My favorite part in the service, and my most joyous experience, is when, having confessed our sins together I declare the assurance of pardon from our God using Scripture.  Often I quote from this passage in 1 John.
             This is a time of year in which Christians can choose to praise the Lord for salvation from sin.  It is a season to reflect on the gracious reality that God has chosen to come near to us in Jesus.  These are days in which our reflection upon the person and work of Christ is to lead us to eternal praise as we glorify our Lord and Savior, Jesus.  Glory to God in the highest; peace on earth; and, goodwill to humanity on whom his favor rests!
             Gracious God, I praise your holy name for sending your Son, the Lord Jesus, to this earth in order to redeem humanity.  Help me so completely to confess my sins and accept your forgiveness that I glorify your name. May your good news of salvation permeate my life in both words and actions in the power of the Spirit.  Amen.

An Ode to Grace

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
            

 

 
            I believe that the greatest motivator in the church, as well as in all of life, is neither guilt and manipulative arm-twisting, nor the shame of past things done or left undone.  To be sure those are powerful motivations.  But nothing in all creation can capture and captivate the heart like grace.  Grace is free, but not cheap; it is unlimited, yet still precious, even more than the most precious of diamonds.  Sin, death, and brokenness permeate this fallen world.  Every organization and institution, every individual and family is profoundly touched in some way by evil.  So enters grace – undeserved mercy where there is no earthly reason to bestow it.  Grace makes absolutely no sense.  Pardoning sinners and systems who have gone their own way and ignored their Creator is the height of God’s redeeming action.  The most wonderful miracle is not some nebulous Christmas miracle of new stuff, but the truly miraculous act of the incarnation in which the Son of God entered humanity, vulnerable, taking the audacious risk of rescuing lost people.
 
            I understand that most people in this world are not Christians; even professing Christians often seem oblivious to the implications of their arm-chair belief.  What is more, perhaps the majority of the earth’s population views any kind of doctrine of grace as rather offensive and unbelievable.  Forgiving sin is typically not at the top of anyone’s Christmas wish list.  Peace on earth hinges not on the ability to get one’s own way or skill in beating up one’s enemies; peace turns on the scandal of forgiveness toward sinners, of grace.
 
            Certainly there is beauty in a newly fallen snow; in a child’s enjoyment of it with a fresh snow angel; in coming in from the cold with the simple pleasure of a steaming cup of hot cocoa.  Yet, there is no beauty that compares to the grace of God coming in an ordinary feeding trough in order to identify with lowly people in need of a Savior.  It is more than an example to follow; of greater implication than feeling good about the holidays in a movie-inspired Christmas spirit – grace is necessary for our deliverance from everything that enslaves us.
 
            People live and die; churches come and go; seasons pass by and the calendar marches on with a seemingly unending string of bad events that makes some wonder if things can truly be different.  However, the faith, hope, and love originating from the grace of God in Christ cannot pass by and leave something untouched any more than a city crippling blizzard.
 
            Yes, being with family helps in having a Merry Christmas; a Christmas bonus aids in making the holiday more special; and, Nativity scenes dotting neighborhood lawns makes us feel good that the Christ is being emphasized in Christmas.  But it is grace, the grace of God that is found in a stable full of manure, brings not only the real meaning of Christmas to us, but the motivating understanding that God did it for me – that grace is given right smack in the middle of all my degrading and misguided attempts to have meaning apart from the Meaning-Maker.
 

 

            Grace.  There is nowhere else to find it, that is, truly find it apart from the Lord Jesus Christ.  My Ode to Grace is this:  that God, the God of the Universe who created all things and sustains the world despite its rejection of Him – this God pursued me with an unrelenting love and saved me from myself.  There is no greater gift than the gift of grace, and no greater present given than one’s only Son.  Let the world rejoice; let earth receive her king.  Even so, come Lord Jesus.

The Gospel Is for Everyone

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

          One of the finest ways of sucking the joy right out of the Christmas season is to subtly refashion the gracious “good news of great joy to all people” announced by the angel to the shepherds at Christ’s birth into the Scrooge-ish bad news of great judgment to all people who aren’t like me and who don’t think like me.

The church of Jesus Christ has struggled through its history to uphold this basic message of the gospel of grace for everyone. From the Council of Jerusalem in the book of Acts that met to decide whether one ought to become a Jew first in order to be a Christian, to the with-holding of membership to African-Americans in certain churches in the 20th century, to the just plain ignoring of the poor and marginalized among us, we must be intentional and deliberate about reaching and ministering to all people. The joy of salvation is that I do not need to jump through certain spiritual hoops to enter into Christianity, nor be a certain kind of person. The church is not an exclusive club of one particular sort of people based in race, gender, ethnicity, class, spiritual pedigree, or even certain preferences on issues. Through repentance and faith in Jesus, all may come to God.

 


All people have intrinsic worth as individuals created in the image of God, and therefore need the attention of Christians in bringing the gospel to them. It is much too easy to ignore people we do not understand and who are different from us, or to look down on those who do not agree with me on disputable matters. When it comes to the good news of Jesus, having people out of sight does not mean we keep them out of mind. Too many people are often off the radar of many churches for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because poor and needy is trumped by wealthy and powerful for attention. To intentionally reach and minister to a different class or generation or race requires much love and many resources.

Jesus had a big enough inner space to accommodate prostitutes, drunks, tax collectors, and a whole variety of sinners. How big is your inner space? Is it big enough to allow people in your life who are not like you without you feeling threatened and insecure? The Pharisees feared being contaminated if having table fellowship with such people; the Sadducees were afraid of losing their religious power over people if the status quo was changed in ministering to such low-lives; and, the Zealots feared continued Roman domination if Jesus kept up spending his time in graciousness to all kinds of sinners. So, all the religious people killed him.

We enter this Advent season and celebrate the incarnation of Christ; the Son of God was born in order to die for us. The gospel of Jesus is the good news of great joy for every person who will look to him. We are to work together to propagate this message by having the shared purpose of evangelism to everyone without discrimination. When we together engage in this critical endeavor, there is tremendous joy, and the giant sucking sound of the joy going out of the season is gone. May you find the joy that is yours in Christ. May your heart rejoice and be glad, for salvation has come to every person who believes.