Tag: God’s plans

The Time Has Come

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Christmas is almost here. Just today and tomorrow, and we have made it through the entire season of Advent. We can shift gears to celebrating the Christmas season. On the fourth Sunday of Advent yesterday, we got back to the basics and talked about the story that started all the excitement. It is a story that is perhaps greatly familiar to you. So familiar, in fact, that you have a tendency to tune it out. Let me challenge you to not tune it out this week. Engage with the story and reflect with me on just what exactly you need to do about it.

The Time Has Come

The best and most successful innovations happen at just the right time. Consider the iPhone. It came along at a time when cell phone service was really starting to hit its stride. Much earlier, and the service required to unlock its full potential wouldn’t have been widely enough available to see it succeed so spectacularly as it has. Much later, and the market would have become so saturated by competitors that it never would have gotten very far off the ground. As it stands, I suspect nearly everyone in the room has one in their pocket or purse. For the rest who have an Android device, I just want you to know that this is a judgment-free environment, and we love all people, even if they make choices clear thinking people find questionable. I kid…mostly. Indeed, though, when things come at just the right time, everything seems to go like clockwork. It all falls together, and the results can be nothing less than world-changing. 

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Signs and Wonders

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When you set about playing the long game toward a goal that is not going to be fast or easy to achieve, sometimes you go through seasons when things seem so messy that they couldn’t possibly allow you to go any further. These seasons can be incredibly discouraging. We want to just quit and go home. Thankfully, our God specializes in accomplishing His plans in seasons just like this. He’s always been committed to playing the long game, and He’s really good at it. Let’s look today at a story from Israel’s past when He did just that, and along the way gave some pointers to what His bigger and better plans always were.

Signs and Wonders

Do you remember doing the science project in elementary school where you grew a lima bean seed to a sprout in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel in it? I think I did that one two or three times growing up. You put the seed in the bag next to the wet paper towel, leave it in some sunlight, and in a few days you can watch as the seed splits open and a little sprout begins to push its way out. Those particular seeds are chosen because they don’t take long to grow and kids aren’t typically known to be terribly patient scientists. They also get distracted easily. I think that by the time mine had grown only a few inches long, I was ready to toss it and move on to something else. 

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Morning Musing: Matthew 14:1-2

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“At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the report about Jesus. ‘This is John the Baptist,’ he told his servants. “He has been raised from the dead, and that’s why miraculous powers are at work in him.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever read something in the Scriptures and wondered how on earth the author could have come to know that particular detail? We don’t encounter this much in the Old Testament, but the Gospel authors all have places where there are details reported they were present to have observed or experienced for themselves. Sometimes they report the conversations that happened in gatherings of priests that included none of Jesus’s followers when they happened. Matthew reports a private conversation between Pilate and his wife. Here he reports what was apparently a private conversation between Herod and his servants. How did they come by this knowledge? Let’s explore that briefly this morning through the lens of an interesting little connection that’s easy to miss.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 25:8-9

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“They are to make a sanctuary for me so that I may dwell among them. You must make it according to all that I show you – the pattern of the Tabernacle as well as the pattern of all its furnishings.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is God’s plan for His world? That’s an awfully big question for which there are more answers than we could hope to address in a single blog post. But when we begin to take stock of some big patterns we find in the Scriptures, we find ourselves able to say some things with a little more clarity and confidence than others. What we see here as God prepares to start giving Israel instructions for constructing a place for them to worship gives us a clue as to what at least one of God’s big goals is. Let’s explore what’s going on here together.

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The Gifts of Advent: Matthew 1:16-17

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* Let me offer my apologies on the early and incomplete version of this that went out earlier this morning. One of my major pet peeves when working on a laptop is that you can’t turn off the touch pad. The way I hold my hands when I type I sometimes hit the touchpad with the pad of my hand resulting in the cursor suddenly getting punched in random and unexpected places. With my current laptop that doesn’t happen quite as often, but this morning the cursor happened to be sitting on the “publish” button on my screen. The odds of that are vanishingly small, but there it was. Thankfully, there is a safeguard built into the page so you don’t accidentally publish something before you’re really ready. It asks if you are sure. My fat hand, however, managed to hit the publish button not once, but twice, send it live before I could hit the cancel button. When I went back to actually finish writing, I made sure the cursor was on the complete opposite side of the screen. Here, then, is the full version.

“…and Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus who is called the Messiah. So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations; and from David until the exile to Babylon, fourteen generations; an from the exile to Babylon until the Messiah, fourteen generations.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Everyone has a story. That’s something our culture today tends to celebrate. What is also true, but to which we don’t give quite as much attention today is that everyone is part of a story. We tend to focus only on ourselves and the chapter we are writing, but our story is only part of a much larger story that has been unfolding for far longer than the boundaries of our lives. As much as this is true about each one of us, it was also true about Jesus. And although His legacy includes some things that ours likely does not, it also includes a bunch of other parts that ours do share. This is all another gift God gives and which we can celebrate in this season of giving. Today, let’s talk about the gift of legacy.

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