Christmas is coming!  (You may need to pause, breathe, and repeat.)

Christmas in our world today is more likely to conjure up images of crowded parking lots, obligatory office parties, and low grade anxiety over shopping for the perfect gift than peaceful scenes out of a Hallmark Christmas card.  Simplicity is not the word typically used to describe the Christmas season in a typical North American home!

When I first arrived to Central Africa, I remember a Brazilian missionary telling me: “If you don’t know how to laugh here, you’ll end up crying.” Being surrounded by the daily realities of malaria, typhoid, and oppressive poverty can take a toll on you, unless you are buoyed by a sense of holy laughter.  Believe it or not, the same advice may now hold true of our navigation of the Christmas season!  You may need to partake in holy laughter to truly enjoy the meaning of Christmas. 

The great preacher at Westminster Chapel of London, Martin Lloyd-Jones, once wrote:

“When the King of Kings and Lord of Lords came into this world, he came into a stable. If you do not feel a sense of holy laughter within you, I do not see that you have a right to think that you are a Christian.”

The craziness of our Christmas season is actually topped by the incredulity of the manger!  A manger?!?  Really?  To an unwed teenage bride?  (Since when was this a good idea?)  Smelly shepherds coming in from the field?  (Please, guys, don’t touch the baby – really, think of the germs!!)

Yet, what does holy laughter really mean?  Holy laughter, in my mind, means rejoicing in the subversive simplicity of God’s redemption in our world which breaks human paradigms to the point that it’s comical.  Go on and chuckle at the thought of God’s rescue mission – a manger! – it just might be good for your soul. 

Grateful to be with you this Christmas season,

Pastor Jason Carter

 A couple of interesting articles from the blogosphere.  Enjoy! (Click on the titles below to read the entire article.)

Some Thoughts on Thoughts and Prayers

• "When we pray, our heart is softened to the needs of those around us. We become sensitive to the suffering of others, and often God plants within us ideas to act on our love for others. For Christians, prayer is the spring from which our love and mercy for others flows. Prayer is where we awaken to the needs of those around us—and to the specific calling God has given us to care for those needs."

Does Your Church Ever Make You Feel…Uncomfortable?

• Consumeristic Christianity leads to diminishing returns: "The data seems to suggest that more people who leave their church for a noncentral issue go on to be dissatisfied with the next church they attend. Satisfaction with church does not necessarily result from our preferences being met."

• "It should come as no surprise that younger Christians (millenials) -- who grew up with limitless consumer options -- are the least likely to say they are 'very satisfied' with church."

On October 31, 2017, the Protestant Reformation turns 500 years old, commemorating the posting of the 95 Theses that Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church. 

The Reformation and the Glory of God (John Piper)

"The Reformers believed that only grace could raise us from the dead, and only Christ could become our punishment and our perfection. These two miracles—of life from the dead and wrath removed—could only be received as a gift through faith. They could never be merited or earned, all so that the entire transaction would culminate soli Deo Gloria—to the glory of God alone."

Did The Reformation Secularize the West? (Kevin Flatt)

"Once, in the Middle Ages, Western Christendom was united in a shared faith under a single Roman Catholic church. All areas of life were suffused with religious influence and significance, and it was almost impossible to disbelieve in God or live one’s life as if he were unimportant. But the Protestant Reformation came along and shattered this unity, creating deep, irresolvable disagreements about fundamental questions of authority, doctrine, worship, and morality—even among Protestants themselves. The resulting conflicts could and did turn violent, as the various groups persecuted each other and doctrinal disputes provided pretexts for religious wars.

These events had two unintended long-term consequences: the privatization of religion and the rise of religious individualism. Privatization said, in effect, if we can’t agree about religion, let’s keep religion out of the things we do together as a society—science, philosophy, commerce, government, education. Individualism said, since we can’t agree, let every man be his own judge in religious matters. While privatization led to the stripping of religion from the public square, individualism led to a breakdown in religious authority in the church and at home, ending in full-blown relativism: what’s true for you isn’t true for me, and you have no right to tell me what to do. Thus, in the long run, the Reformation removed religion from most areas of life and undercut the viability of local church communities rooted in shared beliefs. Or, in Clue terms, “The Reformation did it with religious divisions in the sixteenth century!"

Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (Eric Metaxas)

I'm currently reading Martin Luther's new biography by Eric Metaxas who also wrote a thoughtful and engaging biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled "Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy".  The Metaxas biography of Luther is a good way to celebrate the 500th anniversary of our Protestant tradition.  Tolle lege -- "Take up and read!"

To read the Essay "Jesus as the New Israel" accompanying the sermon series "All About Jesus: Explorations in the Gospel of John", click here. 

From time to time, I'll share some interesting blog posts to read from the blogosophere.  Enjoy! (Click on the titles below to read the entire blog post.) 

  "Do you Actually Want to Be Our Pastor?"

"But it didn’t take me long to figure out that lots of churches don’t actually want a pastor. They want a leadership coach or a fundraising executive or a consultant to mastermind a strategic takeover (often performed under the moniker of evangelism or missional engagement). In this scheme, there’s little room for praying and gospel storytelling, for conversations requiring the slow space needed if we’re to listen to love.”

 "A Response to Christians who Are Done with Church"  (Carey Nieuwhof)

“People criticize the church today as being consumeristic. And to some extent, churches cater to consumerism—often to our detriment. I agree that consumerism is a problem for Christianity.

But ironically, much of the dialogue about why people are done with church pushes people deeper into Christian consumerism than it pushes them into deeper discipleship: Here I am, all alone, worshipping God on my schedule when it’s convenient for me.

Listening to a podcast of your favourite preacher while you’re at the gym or on the back deck and pushing three of your favourite worship songs through your ear buds does not make you a more passionate Christ follower.

It usually makes you a less effective one.”

 Is Your Church an Institution? (Ray Ortlund)

“Institutions are not a problem. But institutionalization is. An institution can enrich life, but institutionalization takes that good thing and turns it into death. How? The structure, the mechanism, the means, becomes the end. The institution itself takes on its own inherent purpose.”

1 Timothy 6:6: “Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment.”

“Christian contentment is soul business.” Thus says the 17th century Puritan preacher Jeremiah Burroughs in the Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. Here are some nuggets of wisdom from the 17th century about contentment. (Quotes from Burroughs are indented below.)

1. Contentment is gained, many times, by subtraction.

§  “A Christian comes to contentment, not so much by way of addition, as by way of subtraction. That is his way of contentment, and it is a way that the world has no skill in. I open it thus: not so much by adding to what he would have, or to what he has, not by adding more to his condition; but rather by subtracting from his desires, so as to make his desires and his circumstances even and equal.”

2. Contentment resides in being reconciled to the NOW of your present condition.

§  “And the truth is, I know nothing more effective for quieting a Christian soul and getting contentment than this, setting your heart to work in the duties of the immediate circumstances that you are now in, and taking heed of your thoughts about other conditions as a mere temptation.”

3. Contentment resides in molding our will and our desires to the providential will of God. (It is one thing to obey God’s commandments but an entirely different maturity is required to accept the providential will of God.)

4. Contentment resides in taking all of God’s blessings as tokens of the love of God. (Can I count my blessings “one by one”, knowing that every blessing is bestowed by a gracious and loving God?)

§  “Every good thing the people of God enjoy, they enjoy it in God’s love, as a token of God’s love, and coming from God’s eternal love to them, and this must need to be very sweet to them."

5. Contentment resides in contemplation and identification with the cross of Christ. (Aren’t my daily complaints and small afflictions rendered powerless in the contemplation of Christ who died on the cross for me?)

§  “The exercising of faith on what Christ endured, is the way to get contentment in the midst of our pains. Someone lies vexing and fretting himself, and cannot bear his pain: are you a Christian? Have you ever tried this way of getting contentment, to act your faith on all the pains and sufferings that Jesus Christ suffered: this would be the way of contentment, and a Christian gets contentment when under pains, in this way.”

6. Contentment resides in the appropriating the strength that comes from the outside. (Even though Burroughs defines contentment as “that sweet, inward, quiet gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition”, there is no contradiction in the “inward” grace of contentment because it ultimately is grounded on the strength which always comes from outside of one’s self.)

§  “A Christian finds satisfaction in every circumstance by getting strength from another, by going out of himself to Jesus Christ, by his faith acting upon Christ, and bringing the strength of Jesus Christ into his own soul, he is in this way enabled to bear whatever God lays on him, by the strength that he finds from Jesus Christ.”

7. Contentment resides in enjoying and making much of God. (Jonathan Edwards, Jon Piper, and Jeremiah Burroughs all acknowledge this truth. It’s a truth that has endured through many centuries. Wanting contentment is the surest path to loose contentment, if that "wanting" is a looking to self and not to Christ.)

§  “A godly heart enjoys much of God in everything he has, and knows how to make up all wants in God himself.”

8. Contentment resides in being properly burdened. (Contentment is not found by ignoring my concerns or afflictions but getting to the point where my sin is judged to be worse than my circumstances.)

9. The mystery of contentment resides in the following paradox: The Christian is the most contented person in all the world and also the most unsatisfied person in all the world. (That I was made for another world & that my soul is enlarged enough to be filled with God — therein lie both my dissatisfaction and my contentment.)

§  Godliness teaches us this mystery….A soul that is capable of God can be filled with nothing else but God; nothing but God can fill a soul that is capable of God….Therefore you will observe, that whatever God may give to a gracious heart, a heart that is godly, unless He gives Himself it will not do.”

10. Contentment resides in running swiftly to the Covenant of Grace. Contentment resides in appropriating the truth that God has bound himself to you in a covenant of grace. (Run swiftly, run often, run daily to the Covenant! Its objective, solid truth is the foundation for my contentment. God is for me. God loves me. God has bound himself to me eternally. May I preach to myself often about the Covenant of Grace.)

§  “It is a special sign of true grace in any soul, that when any affliction befalls him, in a kind of natural way he repairs immediately to the Covenant. Just as a child, as soon as ever it is in danger, need not be told to go to his father or mother, for nature tells him so; so it is with a gracious heart: as soon as it is in any trouble or affliction there is a new nature which carries him to the Covenant immediately, where he finds ease and rest. If you find that your heart works in this way, immediately running to the Covenant, it is an excellent sign of true grace.”