The Whole Christmas Thing

A woman was Christmas shopping with her two children. After hours of looking at toys and much else and hearing both her children ask for everything they saw, the three of them got on an elevator. She was feeling what so many of us feel during the holiday season: pressure to go to every party, taste all the holiday food, get that perfect gift for every person, make sure not to forget anyone on our card list, and respond to everyone who sent us a card.

The elevator doors opened. A crowd was in it. She pushed her way in and dragged in her kids and bags of stuff. When the doors closed, she blurted out, “Whoever started this whole Christmas thing should be found, strung up and shot.”

From the back of the car everyone heard a calm voice respond, “We already crucified him.” For the rest of the trip down there was a tense silence in the elevator.

Have you ever heard anybody say, “I HAVE to do my Christmas shopping.” It sounds like a duty, and something is wrong with that picture. So what will happen if you simply don’t give gifts to people who have traditionally expected them? Many people will be relieved, because your gifts always made them feel obligated to give you something in return. Some people will be disappointed, because they have just been trading with you. So what have you really lost?

You can’t control what people think of you, but you could explain that all the shopping has begun to interfere with your celebrating the birth of Jesus. You could tell them that you don’t expect anything from them, either, but that you’re not telling them what to do.

God freely gave us his Son from a heart of love. What we all really want is to feel loved by people who care about us and enjoy being around us no matter what we do. Have you known love like that? God gives that kind of unconditional love. This year, receive the love of the One who started this whole Christmas thing.

Hope and Giving to the Church

Hope can be inspiration for giving money to the church. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” I’ll be honest with you. I hope that members of New Hope will give money to what they hope to see God do in our church.

Fleda and I are giving 10% of our income to New Hope because

• We hope to see parents bring children to church so that they grow up in church and love it. • We hope to see people who are distant from God come to know and love God as we know God in Jesus.

• We hope to see people become students of Jesus and grow spiritually and emotionally as they read and understand the Bible.

• We hope to see New Hope Baptist Church become stronger and continue to be a growing, loving church family long after we are gone.

We hope for some more visible things like new buildings, too, but what happens in people’s relationship to God is most important.

Work of Faith, Labor of Love, Patience of Hope

We are in the middle of our Stewardship campaign. It is an attempt to get us all focused on giving to the church as a way of expressing our faith in God, our love for God, and our hope in Jesus Christ. We are looking carefully at the words Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica, “I’m praying for you as I think about your work of faith, your labor of love, and your patience of hope in following Jesus.”

What is our work of faith? As I tried to say last Sunday, faith means all of us giving because we trust in God to use our efforts here at New Hope. Sometimes we may feel that our work in is vain. It is all too easy to get our minds focused on what is not going right: a person who seems never to respond to the call of love, a lack of funds to get done what we see needs to be done, evidence that while some are working hard to move our church forward, other members seem to prefer staying uninvolved. Don’t put you thoughts there. Put your mind on what God is doing. Faith sees the truth that our work is in God’s hands.

What is our labor of love? Our Long Range Planning Committee has been hard at work proposing that we begin a building program when we begin to make ends meet on a regular basis. We are working toward the day when we are giving enough every week to be able to put some money in savings for future ministries. But our plans are not about buildings. They are about the lives of people whom God loves. We want more people to know God as we know God in Christ. We want more people to come into the family of God’s love.

What shows our patience of hope? We don’t give up. We don’t grow weary in doing good work for God. Our hope comes from the fact that we believe God is at work to do us good. We can handle our present momentary troubles because God is renewing us from the inside out every day.

Do you see how God has been at work in your life? Do you see how God is working to lead our church into a bright future? What will you then give out of faith, love, and hope? Will you commit to worship regularly, study the Bible regularly, serve your church, and give out of your income as God has blessed you?

Henri Nouwen on Real Love

Nouwen starts with the love of God as a Spirit-given reality. He is thinking of Romans 8:15-16, which says, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God . . ..” Nouwen says, “The Spirit reveals to us not only that God is ‘Abba, Father’ but also that we belong to God as his beloved children. The Spirit thus restores in us the relationship from which all other relationships derive their meaning.”

All other relationships derive their meaning from our relationship with God who is our Abba. And Abba is a name for God that indicates closeness. The translation “Daddy” gets at our way of expressing closeness to our human fathers. I also like “Papa,” since I called my grandfather Papa, and he was my closest father figure when I was a child and a teenager. Thinking of God as Daddy or Papa helps us to think of God as embracing and nurturing care, without the “connotation of authority, power, and control that the word Father often evokes.” God’s love includes and goes way beyond “all the love that comes to us from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and spouses.” Paul in Romans says our ability to call out to God as our Abba comes from the Spirit as a gift.

None of us would be here today if someone had not cared for us when we were infants. We cannot live without the love of our parents, sisters, brothers, spouses, and friends. Without love we die. This was clearly seen, Greg Baer points out when after WWI many infants orphaned in Europe we given good nutrition and medical care, but warehoused in big institutions. Infants were in crib after crib with no one to hold them except for feeding when some busy nurse found time. Three fourths of those babies died. Why? Because without love we die.

“For many people this love comes in a very broken and limited way. It can be tainted by power plays, jealousy, resentment, vindictiveness, and even abuse. No human love is the perfect love our hearts desire, and sometimes human love is so imperfect that we can hardly recognize it as love.”

How do we ever learn to open ourselves to Real Love, God’s Love when we have been wounded by those who love us with imperfect human love? We have to act on faith and trust that the Source of Real Love is God’s unlimited, unconditional, perfect love. We must trust that this love is not far away from us and is the gift of God’s Spirit both dwelling in us and available to us through many human channels.

Stewardship: Faith, Love, Hope

This November at New Hope we are thinking about stewardship under the themes of faith, love, and hope, using Paul’s words to the church at Thessalonica: “We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).

What does it mean to be a steward of the gifts God has given you? A steward is simply a manager of someone else’s property. We are taking care of what belongs to God. A man looked around at all the suffering and injustice in the world and cried out, “Dear God, look at all the pain and the distress in your world. Why don’t you send help?”

God responded, “I did send help. I sent you!” Our faith is that we are God’s stewards sent here to help.

The church is our reminder that everything we have is a gift of the God who loves us. We did nothing to deserve being alive today. Life is God’s gift to us, not because we deserve it, but because God gave it to us out of his heart of love. We can’t know the meaning of life if we believe that we are entitled to everything we have. God gave us this life.

Our hope is that God is going to use us to do good. We enjoy caring for each other in New Hope Baptist Church, but we are not angels. We are human beings, and we sin. Even the good we do can be marred by our failings. That is why we find hope in God’s forgiving love and in God’s power to use our flawed efforts.

Thanksgiving is not “Turkey Day.” We Christ followers use this holiday as a time to be thankful stewards. We aren’t fooled by the world’s values. We know that Thanksgiving is much more than eating lots of food and shopping for Christmas presents. It is thankfulness for faith to do the work God gives us to do, for the gifts of his love, and for our hope that we are serving God’s coming kingdom.