The Real Story of Christmas

Black Friday is generally the biggest one-day shopping day of the year, and the “beginning” of the Christmas shopping season. With the rise of online shopping has come the advent (excuse the pun) of Cyber-Monday, which offers a whole new way to get great shopping deals leading up to Christmas. By all accounts, both Black Friday and Cyber-Monday were outstanding successes this year.

It is not just about Christmas shopping, though. This year I saw news pieces about people finding great shopping deals to buy for themselves. It seems that the season is not just about giving. It is about getting the best deal that you can on something you want.

While America is shopping, the world, it seems, is sinking into deeper and deeper trouble. Our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is currently in Myanmar (Burma), one of the world’s greatest abusers of human rights and a country suspected of cooperating with North Korea on ballistic missiles. In addition, world-wide economic woes continue, with general concern around the world about the impending collapse of economies in Europe.

While pondering these national and international issues and with Christmas approaching, I have been pondering two passages of Scripture that ought to give us hope. It seems that Jesus came into a world where personal selfishness and international turmoil reign. Behind it all is the ongoing battle between good and evil. In the midst of that battle, Jesus brings us hope and ultimate victory.

Micah 5:1-4 predicted the birth of a new ruler would take place in Bethlehem at a time when a siege was laid against Israel that would strike their ruler with a rod. Although Bethlehem was an insignificant place in Israel, this coming ruler was tied to the nation’s heritage — his “origins are from of old, from ancient times.” Micah prophesied that “He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God” and “his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.” The baby born in Bethlehem would bring stability to a world of selfishness and turmoil.

The great victory that Christ’s birth brings into the world is underscored in Revelation 12 when the scenes from the birth of Jesus that we read about in the Gospels are set in cosmic terms. One commentator says that the Gospels tells us the story of Jesus’ birth from an earthly viewpoint, while Revelation 12 tells us the story of Jesus’ birth from a heavenly viewpoint.

In Revelation 12 the story pictures “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head” who cries out as she is about to give birth. Then an enormous dragon attacks with the purpose of devouring her child as soon as he is born. The child is protected, resulting in a war breaking out in heaven. But the dragon is defeated, and a loud voice from heaven announces the salvation and power and the Kingdom of God that have come as a result.

Both Micah and Revelation show us the great battle we are engaged in that is, in part, a product of the selfishness and turmoil of our world. In the midst of the battle a child is born. He is born in the humblest of circumstances, but he is the greatest child, the greatest king of all who will yet rescue the world for God. That is the story of Bethlehem.

Fred Craddock – A “Preaching Genius”

One of the preachers who has influenced my own preaching through his sermons and books is Fred Craddock. He is a master storyteller-preacher who has taught and influenced dozens of preachers. This week CNN’s Belief Blog has an excellent profile of Craddock, who is now 83, that discusses his preaching as well as his personal journey of faith. You can find the profile here. I highly recommend reading it.

International Day of Prayer For the Persecuted Church

November 13, is The International Day of Prayer For the Persecuted Church. While our constitution establishes religious freedom in the United States, there is growing evidence of that right being seriously eroded. Yet, such freedom does not exist at all in many countries of the world. In many of those countries, Christians face persecution resulting in imprisonment, torture, and martyrdom.

On November 6, my sermon theme will be “Hazardous” as we examine Acts 5, one of the times in the book of Acts when the early church faced persecution. From those early days until now, living for Christ has always been hazardous. Today, however, persecution has risen around the world to new levels. So we need to be aware of the plight of many of our brothers and sisters in other nations and pray for them.

Certainly we can expect persecution to come to those who follow Christ. Jesus told us that “Everyone will hate you because of me” (Luke 21:17). In John 15:18 & 20, Jesus said, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” and “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” In Acts 14:22, Paul would say, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.”

Sunday our bulletin will include an insert with stories of people who are experiencing these very things today:

• Gao Zhisheng is a Christian and prominent human rights attorney in China who was seized from his home in 2009 and imprisoned without a trial.
• Asia Bibi, a mother of five in Pakistan, was accused of blaspheming Muhammad and sentenced to death.
• Youcef Nadarkhani was arrested in Iran for opposing the practice of forcing Christians to read the Quran in school and has been held in solitary confinement.
• Puih H’bat was arrested in her home in Vietnam while leading a group of Christians in prayer.

These are the conditions many Christians around the world face. So we must pray for them.

You can learn more by visiting the web site of Voice of the Martyrs: www.persecution.com.

Jesus’ Claim On Your Life

In a Thursday morning Bible study that I have been teaching since June, we are currently studying the Gospel of John. Among the unique things about John’s Gospel are the claims that Jesus makes about himself. Among the four Gospels, we read these claims only in John. He did not so much write a narrative of Jesus’ life as he wrote a reflection on who Jesus is.

Consider, for instance, the uniqueness of Jesus’ “I am” statements that John presents:

• “I am the bread of life” — John 6:35.
• “I am the light of the world” — John 8:12.
• “I am the good shepherd” — John 10:11.
• “I am the resurrection and the life” — John 11:25.
• “I am the way and the truth and the life — John 14:6.
• “I am the true vine” — John 15:1.

Those are just the most familiar of the claims that Jesus makes. Each of them is filled with meaning, but let’s examine just one for a moment: Jesus’ claim to be “the light of the world.”

When Jesus makes that claim, he continues by saying, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Then he demonstrates what he means by the claim through the continuing dialog and events of the text.

• When the Pharisees challenged the validity of the claim, he went on to claim, “If you knew me, you would know my Father also” — John 8:19.
• He then claimed that he is going away — referring, of course, to heaven — and said, “Where I go, you cannot come” — John 8:21. We cannot go there, he said, because “You are of this world; I am not of this world” — John 8:23. We can only go where he is when he takes us there because we put our faith in him.
• When we hold to his teaching, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” — John 8:31-32.
• Finally, when the Jewish leaders claimed Abraham as their father, Jesus made the remarkable claim, “Before Abraham was born, I am” — John 8:58.

These claims only scratch the surface of Jesus’ claim to be “the light of the world.” Jesus then demonstrated the effect this claim can have on us by healing a blind man in John 9. The man who is healed saw Jesus far better than the leaders of the Jews who were teaching the people about God, but they did not know God.

When this man who was blind believed in Jesus, Jesus made a claim on his life, and he makes a claim on our lives. We need to believe Jesus’ claims, and then we need to let him claim our lives as we walk with him, trust him, and learn from him to know the Father.

IS YOUR CHURCH INNUMERABLE?

There are some things that are innumerable – too numerous to count: grains of sand on the seashore, stars in the sky, and drops of water in the ocean. On a recent drive through Rocky Mountain National Park while in Colorado, I added another one to the list: rocks in the Rocky Mountains. Some actions are innumerable: the tears a mother will shed for her children, and the times a four-year-old will ask “Why…?”

The population of the world is innumerable today. World population remained steady at about one billion people from the time of Christ until about 1600. Then it began to increase until it reached about two billion people during the last century. During the lifetime of most of you who are reading this, world population has grown from two billion to nearly seven billion. That is innumerable (This analysis can be found in Unleashed by Dudley Rutherford, et al from Standard Publishing in the chapter “Innumerable.”). As of July 1, 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the world’s population to be 6.96 billion.

In the book of Acts, the growth of the number of Jesus’ followers could be described as innumerable:

• Acts 1:15 begins with 120 followers of Jesus before Pentecost.
• In Acts 2:41, the number multiplied to more than 3,000.
• In Acts 2:47, the Lord was adding to their number daily.
• Acts 4:4 records that about 5,000 men were now Christians.
• Acts 5:14 tells us that “more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.”
• Acts 6:1 says that “the number of disciples was increasing.”
• Acts 9:31 records this about the church: “Living in the fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.”

By AD 350 there were thirty-one million Christians, more than half the population of the Roman Empire! The church was growing so rapidly that it became virtually impossible to count. Today there are some two billion Christians in the world.

I review those numbers for you in order to ask a question: How does the church once again become innumerable? How does your church become innumerable?

I realize that the number of people in most churches can be counted. As Christians, however, we are part of the world-wide church, so every church should be seeking out as many lost people as they can, so that together we become innumerable. Here are three emphases that I find in Acts that together enable the church to reach innumerable people.

(1) Emphasize the centrality of Christ. If you read through the messages preached by Peter and others that are recorded in Acts, you will find that every one emphasizes Christ above all else. Peter’s message on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 sets the stage by telling us that Jesus’ miracles prove that he is from God, that he was crucified and rose again, as foretold by the prophets and witnessed by the apostles, that he was exalted to the right hand of God, and that he poured out his Spirit on those who witnessed his resurrection. Messages recorded in each of Acts chapters 3, 4, and 5 all repeat that emphasis on Christ. Christ must be emphasized above all by the church.

(2) Emphasize the need for salvation. When Peter concluded his message in Acts 2, he was asked, “What shall we do?” He responded, “Repent and be baptized … in the name of Jesus Christ” and you will receive forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit. This emphasis on salvation continued throughout the messages in Acts, with Peter even announcing in Acts 4:12 that “salvation is found in no one else” except Jesus. This is not just the message of the church. It is the message of every individual Christian. Most people come to Christ because a friend or family member has reached out to them in the name of Christ. Make this the emphasis of your life and your church.

(3) Emphasize the practice of love. In the snapshots in the book of Acts into the life of the early church, we have various pictures of the church loving and caring for each other and for those in the community around them. The church in fact became known in the world around them as a community of people who loved each other and those around them.

Your church can be innumerable. Begin to ask how you can build these three emphases into every aspect of your life and the church. Make your church not just about your church, but about the church around the world reaching innumerable people.

The Gospel–Available to All

Among the stories in the Book of Acts of people who chose to follow Jesus was an Ethiopian man whose story is told in Acts 8:26-39. We do not know his name. He is only known to us as an Ethiopian eunuch who was in charge of the Ethiopian queen’s treasury.

He had gone to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home when the Holy Spirit instructed Philip to go to the desert road that goes from Jerusalem to Gaza. This was the lesser of two roads that went from Jerusalem to Gaza. It was the least traveled road because it stayed out of the populated areas. As he did with Philip, sometimes God sends us to the most unexpected people in the most unexpected places to share the Gospel or to minister to people in Jesus’ name.

When Philip came upon this man on the road, the Spirit instructed him to approach the chariot. When Philip did so, he heard the man reading from Isaiah 53 in the Old Testament, and had the opportunity to explain Isaiah’s prophesy about Jesus to the eunuch and to baptize him.

The Ethiopian, although he was a worshiper of God, was not a Jew nor a Samaritan. He was from an important country as the Ethiopia of that day was a much larger region than today’s country of Ethiopia. At that time, Ethiopia was the whole region of the upper Nile River. As the first non-Judean or non-Samaritan to come to Christ that we know of, this man would become important in the expansion of the Gospel outside Judea. God was beginning to direct the church to take the Gospel to everyone, even the unexpected.

One of the early leaders of the Christian church movement in the U.S., demonstrated that kind of out-of-the-box thinking to lead others to Christ. Barton W. Stone preached for a small church at Cane Ridge in Northern Kentucky beginning in 1791. Stone had a conviction for diversity during a time of slavery, and led the Cane Ridge church in becoming an abolitionist church.

The Cane Ridge Meeting House, as it is still known, had a second level. In the early yeas of Stone’s ministry, the church still had some racial separation and black people had to sit in that second level. As a result of a great 1801 revival at Cane Ridge, many of the white men who were slave owners were convicted by the Holy Spirit and Barton Stones’ preaching to set their slaves free. A few years after that, there were black elders and leaders in the Cane Ridge church, and the entire separation between the races was gone. White and black people worshiped alongside each other on both levels of the church.

God used Barton Stone at Cane Ridge in much the same way that he used Philip in Acts 8 — to make the Gospel equally available to all who believe, regardless of skin color, nationality, position, or any of the other distinctions that we make between people. God is still in the business of using the Holy Spirit to unleash the church to turn the world upside down by reaching all people. Won’t you join him in that effort? Let the Spirit unleash you.

In July, I attended the North American Christian Convention (NACC). The NACC is an annual gathering of Christians (primarily from the movement of independent Christian churches/churches of Christ of which Westwood is a part) from all across North America and the world. It is a gathering for preaching, teaching, retooling for ministers and leaders, connecting with old and new friends, and challenging the church to live out its mission.

Christine and I both attended our first NACC in 1973, just a few months before we were married. Our daughter grew up going to the NACC, and still attends on occasion, especially when it meets in a location within driving distance of her home, as happened this summer and last summer. This summer it met in Cincinnati where she lives, so she attended several sessions with me.

The NACC has been a rich blessing to our family and to me personally. Each convention offers new blessings. This fall, I hope to bring some of the blessings from this year’s NACC to our congregation through a series of messages based on this year’s theme.

The theme this year was “Unleashed — The Church Turning the World Upside Down.” This theme was developed through a series of messages to the adult convention based on the book of Acts. The theme comes from the promise by Jesus in Acts 1 that his followers would have the Holy Spirit poured out on them — that the church would be immersed in the Holy Spirit. That promise was fulfilled in Acts 2. How does the church live when the Spirit is unleashed? Through these messages, we will find how we can emulate the powerful ministry of the church in the book of Acts. Here are the themes we will examine:

• We become a kaleidoscope that attracts the whole world to the church’s welcoming beauty and diversity (Acts 1:8; 10:1-48).
• We see innumerable souls won for the kingdom of God (Acts 2:41-47; 4:4).
• We see pandemonium ensue as others take notice of the excitement and commotion of God’s church working in their midst (Acts 4:13-22).
• We are shaken by the power of God’s Spirit and preach fearlessly and without restraint (Acts 4:23-31).
• We demonstrate lavishness when we see the needs of those around us and give sacrificially (Acts 4:32-37).
• We display a hazardous faith (Acts 5:17-42).
• We are open to the kinetic power of the gospel (Acts 13:41-52).
• We take hold of the unequivocal calling to go into the whole world (Acts 20:22-24).

I am praying that these messages will challenge my life and our congregation to let the Spirit be unleashed in our lives.