Tag: Christmas

What is Love?

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The four advent/Christmas themes are hope, joy, peace, and love. These themes are important all year. This week we focus on love. Our society tells us that love means accepting people just as they are. It tells us that love is that warm, tingling feeling we feel for that special someone. But what is love really? Is it a feeling? A verb?

As Christians, we know that love is a much richer concept than the world around us understands. The Bible tells us that God is love:

The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. (1 John 4:8, NASB)

God is love. As such He defines it. He demonstrates His love for us through Christ:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16, NASB)

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8, NASB)

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10, NASB)

God enables us to love Him and to love others:

We love, because He first loved us. (1 John 4:19, NASB)
We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:16, NASB)
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. (1 John 4:11-12, NASB)

God promises that nothing can separate us from His love:

But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39, NASB)

God sets the standard for how we are to love others:

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:4-8a, NASB)
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. (1 John 4:20-21, NASB)

Sometimes that love means confronting sin. Sometimes it means forgiving others for how they’ve sinned against us. Sometimes it means leaving family and friends behind to follow Christ. Love can be painful.

Love is so much more than a passing feeling. It’s more than romance. It’s more than blind acceptance. Love, true love, is active and self-sacrificial. It puts the needs of others before itself. It’s a fruit of the Spirit and evidence of the saving love we’ve been given. We love God and others because He first loved us. This Christmas season, may we remember the love that God has shown us in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and may we demonstrate that love for others in all that we do.

By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:35, NASB)

N.T. Wright’s New Perspective on Christmas

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Jesus’ birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants. Christmas looms large in our culture, outshining even Easter in the popular mind. Yet without Matthew 1—2 and Luke 1—2 we would know nothing about it. Paul’s gospel includes Jesus’ Davidic descent, but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John’s wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God’s glory is revealed, not in the manger, but on the cross. …

If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different.

N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pgs. 171, 178

Why Did Jesus Come?

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As Christmas is almost upon us this year, I’ve been thinking about why Jesus came to earth. In reading the Scriptures this week, I was struck again by the clarity of this statement:

But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
(Matthew 1:20-21 ESV)

“For He will save His people from their sins.” What beautiful words.

N.T. Wright and others in the progressive/New Perspective crowd believe that believers have gotten too caught up with salvation and sin as it relates to individuals:

the normal Western Christian view: that salvation is about “my relationship with God” in the present and about “going home to God and finding peace” in the future … to make the point once more as forcibly as I can, this belief is simply not what the New Testament teaches.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pg. 196

Instead, Wright believes:

The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context-not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being “fellow workers with God”) within that larger picture and purpose.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pg. 184

As a result, N.T. Wright explains Matthew 1:21 this way:

Matthew agrees with his Jewish contemporaries that the (Babylonian) exile was the last significant event before Jesus; when the angel says that Jesus will “save his people from their sins,” liberation from exile is in view. Jesus, David’s true descendant, will fulfill the Abrahamic covenant by undoing the exile and all that it means.

N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 159

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see great comfort in Wright’s interpretation of the passage. We were a people in exile, however, our exile was not merely from the promised land, but a much greater one. We were exiled from the very presence of God. Every believer who is aware of his sin knows how desperate his situation is apart from Christ.

I find that I much prefer Matthew Henry’s discourse on this passage:

In the reason of that name: For he shall save his people from their sins; not the nation of the Jews only (he came to his own, and they received him not), but all who were given him by the Father’s choice, and all who had given themselves to him by their own. He is a king who protects his subjects, and, as the judges of Israel of old, works salvation for them. Note, those whom Christ saves he saves from their sins; from the guilt of sin by the merit of his death, from the dominion of sin by the Spirit of his grace. In saving them from sin, he saves them from wrath and the curse, and all misery here and hereafter. Christ came to save his people, not in their sins, but from their sins; to purchase for them, not a liberty to sin, but a liberty from sins, to redeem them from all iniquity; and so to redeem them from among men to himself, who is separate from sinners.

Matthew Henry, Commentary on Matthew 1

Maybe I’m overemphasizing the work that Jesus did in reconciling God and man. Then again, maybe Wright et al are seriously under emphasizing the gravity of sin and what it cost Him to save us from it.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel!

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One of my favorite Christmas hymns is “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” I’ve always loved the sense of longing that the carol expresses. In this age of the already and the not yet, it is certainly appropriate to look forward to the day when Christ will come in glory. I love that this hymn evokes the past, present, and future realities of Christianity.

Jennifer Grassman, a gifted musician and member of our church, has written an article on the history of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” She interviewed a rabbi, a seminary professor, and our own pastor, Pastor Dave Muntsinger about the significance of the themes in the hymn. Here is a short excerpt:

As a songwriter and author—not to mention being an avid reader and history buff as well – this reporter finds that good lyrics are always extremely interesting as are the stories behind them. Old hymns and carols are of particularly intriguing, but perhaps none of their backstories are as curious as the evolution of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” We sing the hymn every year in church, we hear it on the radio, and our kids sing it in school musicals. In fact, many of us have grown so accustomed to it that we don’t really hear the words at all anymore!

But did you know that this carol was written between the 8th and 12th century A.D., during a time when Rome was being ravaged by plagues and by war? Did you know that the original composer wrote the hymn’s lyrics in Latin? Or did you ever imagine that it was penned from a pre-Christian Jewish perspective? Questions surrounding this hymn have been around for years. But the key dilemma is this: Was the peculiar perspective of this hymn simply a matter of artistic choice, or could an individual of the Jewish faith possibly have written it?

Time to investigate.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Was Jesus Born of a Virgin? Does it Matter?

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The doctrine of the virgin birth, that Jesus did not have a human father, is one that most professing Christians have considered central to an orthodox understanding of who Jesus is. The Apostles’ creed says Jesus was “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.” The Nicene creed says He was “incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary.” Yet many modern scholars have sought to either deny the virgin birth of Christ as foolishly unbelievable or to diminish the importance of the doctrine. So, does it matter whether or not Jesus was born of a virgin? Here are two well-known writers very different answers.

N.T. Wright, Anglican bishop and New Testament Scholar, wrote an essay for the book, The Meaning of Jesus, on the subject of the virgin birth. Here is a short excerpt of that essay:

Jesus’ birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants. Christmas looms large in our culture, outshining even Easter in the popular mind. Yet without Matthew 1—2 and Luke 1—2 we would know nothing about it. Paul’s gospel includes Jesus’ Davidic descent, but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John’s wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God’s glory is revealed, not in the manger, but on the cross.

If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different. (171, 178)

John MacArthur, pastor and writer, took a different approach in his book, God With Us: Continue reading →