Word of Life Church Podcast

Losing Jesus. Finding Jesus. Rethinking Jesus. This is how we make spiritual progress. This is the only way we make spiritual progress! We think we’ve got Jesus figured out. We think we know the crowd where Jesus can be found. We think we know where we can always locate Jesus. Then one day…he’s not there! And we have to go searching for him. “Seek and you shall find.” But when we find Jesus after losing him, he’s…different. That’s when the rethinking (repenting) starts. It’s the only way we make spiritual progress.

Jesus came into the world at the intersection of beauty and pain. Christ was born on the fault line of our most intractable conflict. O little town of Bethlehem… A city today where the beauty of Orthodox icons and olive wood Nativity sets collides head on with the brutality of teargas canisters and rubber bullets. Hope and horror in the House of Bread.

As Christians we will either be a people of joy and peace or else will belong to the crowd of fear and rage that is so vocal in our day. In an age of fear and rage we are called to be a people marked by joy and peace. One of the scandalous things about the early Christians to the Roman mind was their apparently absurd joy. Despite the fact that the early Christians were often persecuted, they were characterized by an unmistakable joy—not a glib and superficial happiness, but a deep and abiding joy.

Advent is the season where we prepare for the birth of Christ. We don’t just prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ (decorate, shop, bake, etc), but we actually prepare for Christ to born into our lives in a new way. Thus Advent is the season where we do work to keep Christ in Christians.

We are presently in a time of great darkness. The darkness of hate, bigotry, violence, and vengeance threatens to sweep over the world. But in this darkness a light shines -- the light of Jesus. Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophesied about Messiah, saying that he would, "give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death to guide us to the path of peace."