Another Christmas

I hope you had a very merry and blessed Christmas and were able to spend time with family and friends.

As I write this, Christmas Day was four days ago, and it's "all over" for another year. It is true the presents have been opened, the festive food and drink consumed, the carols sung, the Christmas servces attended. Soon our focus will move on to the New Year celebrations—always a strong tradition in my native Scotland—and the resolutions and plans for 2025.

Yet the thing is that Christmas cannot simply be "all over" or "put away" like the boxes of decorations until next December.

What we celebrate at Christmastime is that the birth of Jesus made the world different. It could never be the same again. 

If you are Christian, you understand this already. Anyone reading this who is not yet a Christian, I hope one day you will come to understand it soon.

The coming of Jesus to this world really does mean it is like Christmas every day (and not just in the words of a chessy Christmas pop song).

One of the titles given to Jesus is "Immanuel" which as Matthew 1:23 says (quoting from Isaiah 7:14), means "God with us."

His coming was not a temporary visit. He came to be with us and he is still with us now, in our hearts and by the Holy Spirit.

I pray that you will have Immanuel with you and in you, as we head into the new year in a few day's time.

Waiting for God

The season of advent focuses the Christian church on the need to wait for God. Waiting should be seen as a spiritual discipline. In our modern world, to deliberately stop and wait for something is a very countercultural act. As a culture we prioritise, maybe even idolise, speed and limitation, if not the elimination, of waiting.

During advent, we spend four weeks focusing on the wait. The wait of God's people for centuries for the Messiah to come in his birth at Christmas. We focus too on the wait of God's people for centuries for the Messiah to come again to judge the world and reign over a new heavens and new earth in the eternal Kingdom.

The Bible values waiting. Isaiah 40:31 reads: "They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

In Psalm 130:5-6, we read: "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning."

I always find these verses among the most emotional in the Psalms, especially that use of repetition in verse 6. 

Are we waiting for the Lord this advent? Waiting not only for Christmas, which Lord willing, will surely come around again later this month. Waiting not only for the return of Jesus, which will surely come at the appointed time. But are we waiting on the Lord as the Psalmist waited, with hope in his word, and with a longing to be redeemed and see all our nation redeemed, set free to love and serve the living God.

I pray we are waiting with expectation and readiness, and more than watchmen waiting for the morning, more than watchmen waiting for the morning.