Tag: Playing the Long Game

Advent Reflections: Christmas Eve

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Today is Christmas Eve. Tomorrow is the grand celebration of Jesus’ birth. O happy day! Here’s what I’ll be sharing with my own congregation this evening at our Christmas Eve service. Blessings to you as you prepare to celebrate with your family and friends. As a housekeeping note, this will be the last post until the new year other than this coming Sunday’s sermon on Monday. See you in a week!

Have you ever been a part of a show? No show happens on the spur of the moment. It takes planning. Lots of planning. Often months of planning. Depending on the size of the show, it may take years. But eventually there comes that moment when all the planning is done. Every line has been learned. All the costumes are set. The make-up is applied. The sets and scenery and props are all in place. The band is rehearsed and warm. It’s time for the show to start. 

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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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