Tag: John 1

Expect Christ: Day 7

~ Chuck Griffin ~ Leave a comment

Today is Saturday, Dec. 3, the seventh day in the Advent season.

Morning

Praise and Thanksgiving. Let’s begin by prayerfully reading Psalm 24.

Let’s also praise God, simply acknowledging who God is:

“Dear Lord, we lower our eyes and bow our heads in your presence, knowing full well that you are the Creator and we are merely the created. And yet, you lift up our heads and let us know we are loved. You turn our eyes to the cross so we can see the easy path to salvation you have cleared for us. Fill us with your grace so that we may worship and praise you properly through the day. Thank you for the gifts you have given us, gifts of eternal value! Amen.”

Confession. Let’s bring before God how we have strayed from his will, knowing our Lord will forgive us. Let’s be bold enough to name our sins, even if they seem small, so we squash them before they grow. Let’s open our hands and receive his forgiving grace.

Petitions. Ask for God’s intervention, be our concerns global, national or local, in our schools, churches and communities, or in our families and homes. And certainly, let’s ask that our individual needs be fulfilled, especially where there is spiritual poverty in our hearts.

Scripture. John 1:19-28. What is your role in the coming of Christ’s kingdom?

Silence.

Noon

Let’s continue to pray this prayer together daily:

“Lord, we have entered a season of expectation. We remember the Israelites’ past desire for a savior to arrive, and we mirror what they felt as we long now for the return of Jesus Christ. Come Lord Jesus, come! We pray this with some trepidation, knowing we never feel completely ready for such a day, and that loved ones around us may not be ready. And yet we continue to pray, Come Lord Jesus, come! We trust that your grace at your return will so overwhelm sin and death that all will be set right. As we pray for your full arrival, teach us how to make ourselves ready, living as watchful people. Amen.”

Night

At a minimum, let’s spend some significant time in a quiet, reflective state before retiring for the night. Embrace the day’s spiritual victories and release the failures.

If it has been a while since you tried the meditation techniques offered earlier, might this be a good night to try again?

And as you sleep, may visions of future service in Christ’s name inspire you.

For the One Who Owns Everything

~ Chuck Griffin ~ Leave a comment

By Chuck Griffin

Several of us in my family have birthdays in the spring months. I’ve had presents on my mind; most of us have a tendency to want to show love to someone having a birthday, and we often do so with a present.

For years, I had trouble finding a present for my grandfather around his birthday. As he got into his 80s and 90s, he had few real needs or wants that a present could cover. We still had that urge to give him something, however, if only to let him know how important he was to us.

The last few years of his life, we focused on simple gifts, mostly the kind my wife, Connie, could make in the kitchen. He seemed to genuinely appreciate her cakes and cookies more than anything we could have bought him in a store.

Why did he like them? Well, these gifts were sweet, and he liked sweets, particularly pineapple upside-down cake. I’m sure there was another reason, though. Connie’s work in the kitchen was a simple act of love. And as I dwell on that other reason, my mind also goes to how we respond every day to our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has given us the gift of eternal life.

Obviously, there’s no way to buy something for the one through whom all things were created. We’re blessed, however, with a simple wish list left by Jesus, one expressed very clearly throughout the New Testament.

If we were to package Jesus’ gift, I imagine it going inside one those big gift bags. You know how people pack big gift bags; sometimes there is more than one item inside. I see two items in Jesus’ bag, both related to the love and gratitude we feel.

The first gift is our love for God. Again, we who call ourselves “Christian” understand what God has done for all of us. Once true belief has washed over us, this gift is easy to give. Our awareness of eternal life should cause us to race toward our prayer and worship times with thankful arms held high.

First John 3:14-18 talks about the second gift. Once we’ve experienced that overwhelming love for God, we are told that we should next feel a similar love for those who share our belief in Jesus Christ as Savior. He even positions our ability to love one another as a test of our faith, a determination of whether we are believers or “murderers,” people who abide in death.

As I meditated on this text, I began to wonder if this is the real point of struggle for the modern church. Maybe it always has been; the letter of 1 John was written for a reason. Within the church, starting at the level of a local congregation, have we achieved the kind of mutual love described in these verses? Do we love each other to the point of being willing to lay down our lives for one another? We’re always going to have disagreements, but do we hear each other with patience, forgiveness and openness to the influence of the Holy Spirit?

Lately, as we in the United Methodist Church find ourselves in what seems to be a mission-stalling irreconcilable disagreement over how we read Scripture, I also have to ask this: For the sake of Christ, do we love each other enough to set each other free, to release the unwanted holds we have on each other? Even Paul and Barnabas, out of love for Christ and each other, had to seek such a mindset in the early days of the church.

Lord, we so often find ourselves focusing on discord in church. Help us to show each other whatever kind of love is needed so we may better work on your behalf. Amen.

Getting Christmas

~ Chuck Griffin ~ Leave a comment

John 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

If we are able to pause here and “get it,” we’ll have a proper understanding of the meaning of Christmas. I’ll be the first to admit, however, that these can seem like dense and lofty words.

In short, Jesus is God. Yes, we sometimes call him the “Son of God,” recognizing he is as fully human as he is divine. But he is God, and the divine aspect of Jesus has always existed—before the birth in Bethlehem and the manger, before the virgin conception, even before the universe and time existed.

If you agree with this assertion about Jesus, you are Christian in a scriptural, orthodox sense.

If you disagree, you stand outside that traditional understanding, even if you call yourself Christian. You at a minimum disregard or modify key portions of Scripture, particularly the early chapters of John.

This aspect or essence of God is called the “Word” in most English versions of John. “Word” is a translation of the Greek word “logos,” used by philosophers of the day to describe God’s wisdom. This logos was believed to hold the universe together, like stitches giving cloth its shape.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” John 1:14 asserts, “and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

The power that made all things and holds all things together lived in this world as one of us, an event we call the incarnation. We call this God-man Jesus Christ, and he surprised us with much of what he said and did, like forgiving his enemies and dying among criminals on a cross.

As we move through Christmas toward Easter, we will once again watch how Jesus lived and hear what Jesus taught. We should be constantly mindful that in doing so, we are experiencing a kind of wisdom far deeper than anything that could be contrived by human minds.

If we get it, we may find Christmas and much of the rest of the Christian year to be a serious challenge to how we live.

Lord, what a remarkable truth, that you came among us to teach us, love us, call us to obedience and die for our sins. This Christmas, may we celebrate well that moment of arrival. Amen.