This Resurrection Life

“This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike ‘What’s next, Papa?’ God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!” (Romans 8:15-17, The Message)

I think too many of us are guilty of thinking that eternal life starts after we die. We think that the resurrection life when the good stuff starts and that doesn’t start until we’ve been dispatched to our heavenly rest. But if I read my Bible right, it starts the moment we say YES to Jesus.

Too many of us go through our lives without ever tapping into that resurrection power. Too many of us are like that old lady back in the day who only turned on her electric lights so she could see to light her candles. We’ve settled for trying to do God-sized work with human-sized strength, and that never works.

Did you know that the same power that raised Christ from the dead now lives in you and me? It belongs to anyone who belongs to Jesus. Yet most of us live defeated because we either don’t know the victory has already been won or we’re too distracted to care. Our lives are small because our view of God is too small.

Lord, help us to remember how big You are. You’re bigger than all our problems put together. You’re bigger than anything we’ll ever face. You’re bigger than the whole world. Remind us that Your resurrection power is ours for the asking. Help us to live victoriously because the battle is already won. Be glorified in each and every one of us today. Amen.

Christmas In the Eyes of a Child

“Seeing isn’t believing. Believing is seeing” (from The Santa Clause).

I think the reason so many don’t like Christmas is that they’ve stopped seeing it through the eyes of a child.

Christmas isn’t so much for children as it is for the childlike. I don’t mean the childish who pout every time they don’t get their own way.

I mean the childlike, the ones who never stop believing in good and right and magic and happy endings. The ones who see more than just the physical and still have room for miracles and pixie dust. The ones who still have the ability to be amazed and astonished at life.

Jesus said that anyone who wanted to enter the Kingdom of God must do so as a little child. Whoever really wants to experience all that God is must go back to before the cynicism took root, before disillusionment set in, to when just about anything was possible, because for God, anything IS possible.

So let’s go back to the faith of a child.  Let us once again rediscover the ability to be amazed and astonished by the wonder that is Advent and Christmas and the miracle that made it all possible.

“Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: “Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
Be born here, in this place”?
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
of our hearts and says, “Yes,
let the God of Heaven and Earth
be born here–
in this place”  (Leslie Leyland Fields from Let the Stable Still Astonish).