Rev. Brent L. White

During the month of December, I’ve prepared a series of daily devotionals to help my church get ready for and celebrate Christmas. I created a booklet (if you’d like a copy, let me know), but I’ll also post devotionals each day on my blog.

Devotional Text: Luke 2:8-15

When I was a kid, my father had two jobs related to trimming the Christmas tree. First, he hauled it into the garage, sawed the bottom of the trunk off, and fit it into the tree stand. Next, he untangled the Christmas tree lights and tested the light bulbs. These were the days when lights were wired in “series,” which meant that if just one bulb was out, the entire strand didn’t work. So Dad had to go bulb by bulb, testing each one: untangling and testing, untangling and testing, untangling and testing.

A frustrating job! And let’s just say that Dad used some colorful language to describe his feelings about it! But Dad’s short temper and salty language didn’t bother me or my sisters in the least. In fact, we knew that Christmas was coming soon when Dad was cursing about Christmas tree lights!

As much as I love Christmas as an adult, I miss that feeling of pure, unbridled joy that I couldn’t contain when I was a kid at Christmastime. How about you?

I think this is the kind of joy that the angels have in today’s scripture.

After one angel makes the announcement to the shepherds abiding in the field, he’s joined by what Luke calls a “great assembly of the heavenly forces,” who are shouting, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” I don’t think these angels rehearsed this song in some kind of heavenly choir practice before joining in this heavenly song. I think it was a spontaneous outburst, as if these angels were so happy they couldn’t contain their joy! They had to appear out of heaven to sing God’s praises for sending his Son!

When was the last time you were so happy you just couldn’t hold it in? What if our own worship was like that? What prevents our worship from being like that? Think of something that God has done for you recently and praise him for it.

During the month of December, I’ve prepared a series of daily devotionals to help my church get ready for and celebrate Christmas. I created a booklet (if you’d like a copy, let me know), but I’ll also post devotionals each day on my blog.

Devotional Text: Luke 1:26-38

Gabriel tells Mary, “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The Greek word for “favored one” literally means graced one: “one who is filled with grace.” This reminds us that the only way that Mary can be successful in carrying out God’s plan for her life is through God’s grace.

So… If God gives us the grace we need to answer God’s call for our lives, does that mean that life will be easy? Not at all!

While it’s safe to say that Mary was graced by God as much or more than anyone else who ever lived, notice how profoundly difficult and costly this grace was: Among other things, it meant setting aside lifelong dreams and plans. It meant facing false rumors about conceiving a child out of wedlock. It meant risking execution for adultery—because adultery was a capital crime. It meant risking her own life simply by giving birth—which in this age before modern medicine was dangerous. It meant leaving home and fleeing with her family to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous jealousy. It meant watching her own son suffer and die on a cross.

Truer words were never spoken than when the prophet Simeon tells Mary, shortly after Jesus’ birth, that “a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

God may never ask us to set aside all of our hopes and dreams and plans for his sake. God may never ask us to leave the comfort and security of home for his sake. God may never ask us to risk our lives for his sake. But in many ways, God is asking of us the same thing he asked of Mary: to offer ourselves completely to God, to go where he says to go, to do what he says to do.

What is God asking of you? What is God calling you to do? Pray that when God calls, you will respond the way Mary did: “Here am I, servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your Word.”

During the month of December, I’ve prepared a series of daily devotionals to help my church get ready for and celebrate Christmas. I created a booklet (if you’d like a copy, let me know), but I’ll also post devotionals each day on my blog.

Devotional Text: Luke 1:26-33; John 1:45-46

Back in the first century, Mary and Joseph’s hometown of Nazareth was small and insignificant: About 200 or so poor or working-class people lived there. Remember in John Chapter 1, a disciple named Philip told his friend Nathanael, “Come and see the Messiah. He’s from Nazareth.” And Nathanael said,  “Nazareth? Can anything good come from there?” Nazareth is hardly an obvious place for the Son of God, Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Savior, to call his hometown.

But isn’t that just like God to choose this unlikely girl from this unlikely town to bring God’s Son into the world? Isn’t God always doing this sort of thing? For example, when God first put his saving plan for the world into action, he made a covenant with the least likely person: A 75 year old man named Abraham. God chose this man to start a family that would become God’s covenant people, whose descendants would be as numerous as the stars. Never mind that Abraham and his wife were unable to have children. Never mind that they were way too old to be starting a family. Never mind that another 15 years would pass before Abraham and Sarah have their promised son. Gabriel’s words to Mary surely applied to him: “Nothing is impossible with God.”

Later, God chose Abraham’s descendants, who were slaves in Egypt, to be God’s people. “Nothing is impossible with God.” And he chose as their spokesman a man named Moses, who likely had a speech impediment or who stuttered, to confront the most powerful man in the world. “Nothing is impossible with God.” Still later, God called the youngest and least impressive of Jesse’s seven sons, David, to become his greatest king. “Nothing is impossible with God.”

As Paul told the believers at Corinth, “not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”^[1]

Remember the “senior superlatives” in your high school yearbook? “Most popular,” “Most congenial,” “Most likely to succeed”? If people were voting for the woman “most likely to be the mother of God’s Son,” they wouldn’t have voted for Mary. Fortunately, God knows what he’s doing!

Isn’t there a lesson there for us? Maybe you were never voted “most likely,” “most popular,” “prettiest,” “best looking.” “funniest…” But look out! You may be just the person God is looking for! You are a unique and wondrous creation of God. No one in the world—no one in all of human history, no one who has ever lived—possesses your unique set of gifts, your unique talents, your unique personality. No one is as good at being you as you are. God made you for a purpose and has a plan for your life. Don’t think for a minute that you can’t be used by God, or you’re not good enough to be used by God, or that you have to get all the problems of your life sorted out before you can start living for God.

Living a Christian life—which means being a faithful follower of Jesus—is not for the few, the proud, the super-saintly among us… It’s for the “normal,” the imperfect, the “least likely” people… like you and me.

Do you believe that God has a plan and purpose for your life? Can you think of ways that God has used you to bless others? List some ways. Pray that you can be a blessing to someone today.

1. 1 Corinthians 1:28 ESV

In The Problem of Pain, a masterpiece of Christian theology, C.S. Lewis argues that suffering is necessary for God’s children if God is the loving God revealed in scripture:

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested’, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of the terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artists’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring.^[1]

I thought of this passage when I read Zechariah 8:2: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath.”

As the Lewis passage implies, the Bible portrays the loving relationship between God and his image-bearing creatures in many ways: for example, father and son, friend (John 15:15), king and subject or vicegerent, master and steward, artist and his artwork. But one important if overlooked image for God’s love is erotic: the love of husband and wife. This kind of love is portrayed positively (Song of Solomon; Jesus’ parables of wedding banquets in the synoptic gospels; Ephesians 5:25-33; Revelation 19:6-10) and negatively (many Old Testament prophets, including the entire Book of Hosea and the verse from Zechariah above).

In this post I want to focus on the negative: What does it mean that the Bible portrays God, at times, as nothing less than a jealous lover?

First, if you’ve been in love you know what Zechariah means when he says the Lord is jealous for his beloved “with great wrath”: Erotic love is the kind of love that guards, protects, and fights for his beloved—fearlessly. I’m reminded of a song by the Modern Lovers, Jonathan Richman’s band from the early-’70s, when he sings, “There’s a certain kind of girl that you care about so much/ You say, ‘I don’t care what you guys do to me, but her, don’t touch!'”

Surely you can relate to this feeling, right?

But I haven’t said enough. After all, parental love inspires parents to fight to the death, if necessary, for the sake of their loved ones. But erotic love adds a darker element. I describe it in my journaling Bible as follows:

Consider, too, how the jealous lover regards potential rivals: with pure hatred. This love isn’t merely the kind of love described above: it’s the kind of love that will kill, or at least wants to, when necessary. What does this mean for God and his relationship with us? It means he wants to destroy his rivals in our lives, which seek to woo us away from him and his love.

Given that scripture says he loves us in this way, doesn’t this make further sense of our suffering? Sometimes when we suffer, it isn’t so much that God is punishing us as God is killing within us those affections for people and things—whatever we idolize—that he himself deserves. We should expect this to be painful: If the only way that we will become more faithful members of the “Bride of Christ” is through suffering—whether caused directly by God or, more often, experienced as a necessary consequence of our unfaithfulness to him—then it would be UNTHINKABLE that our righteous Lover would spare us from it! He will not leave us alone until we are completely his—heart, soul, strength, and mind (Luke 10:27).

We see this kind of love literally play out in Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18:20-40.

Indeed, as Lewis writes, “You asked for a loving God: you have one.”

1. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 1940; 1966), 39-40.

During the month of December, I’ve prepared a series of daily devotionals to help my church get ready for and celebrate Christmas. I created a booklet (if you’d like a copy, let me know), but I’ll also post devotionals each day on my blog.

Devotional Text: Matthew 1:1-6; John 20:17

I know it’s difficult to read genealogies without having your eyes glaze over, but concentrate on these names. Do you notice anything strange? 

Why are these mothers mentioned: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah”? Look at the rest of the genealogy. There are no other mothers mentioned, at least until Mary in verse 16. Why these women?

To say the least, they have interesting backstories. Tamar committed incest with her father-in-law, Judah. Rahab was a prostitute and a Gentile, an outsider to God’s people Israel. Ruth was a Gentile from a nation considered an enemy of Israel. And the wife of Uriah happens to be Bathsheba, the woman with whom King David had an adulterous affair, and whose husband, Uriah, David arranged to kill in order to protect their secret. For that matter, by calling Bathsheba the “wife of Uriah,” Matthew is reminding us of David’s great sin.

What is God up to in his Word?

Among other things, God wants to remind us that all these sinners, outsiders, and former enemies belong in the same family with God’s Son Jesus. Because of what Christ did for us through his death and resurrection, we are now—as Jesus tells Mary Magdalene in John 20—his brothers and sisters. His Father is now our Father.

If there’s room for sinners, outsiders, and former enemies in Jesus’ family tree, there’s surely room for someone like me—and you!

If you’ve been made a part of God’s family through faith in Christ, spend time right now praising God for sending his “only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”