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No Room in the Inn – Greg Laurie

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She brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.             —Luke 2:7

In these days of modern technology, we never miss a thing with TiVo, voice mail, DVD recorders, and camera phones. But even though our toys keep us from missing a phone call, they can also cause us to miss the real reason for the holiday season.

You can watch Christmas disappear in front of your eyes, in a heap of shredded wrapping paper, and find yourself saying, “I was so busy shopping, so busy attending this, going to that, that I think I actually missed the point of Christmas.”

It might be surprising to know that the majority of people missed the very first Christmas as well. People just carried on with business as usual, paying no attention to what was happening just a few feet away.

In Luke chapter 2, we are introduced to an innkeeper who had no time for Christmas. In this familiar story, Mary and Joseph came to the innkeeper for a room, but because his inn was full, he turned them away.

The only place he had for this young pregnant woman and her husband was a stable, a cold, dark, and damp stable—which was more than likely a cave. He was too preoccupied with other things to make the time for Christmas.

There are people like this in the world today. They don’t necessarily oppose or hate God outright. They are simply preoccupied. God and spiritual things do not concern them. Their interests lie more in what can immediately satisfy their own physical needs. The innkeeper was too busy to make room in the inn for the soon coming Messiah.

Let me ask you this: have you made room for Jesus this Christmas? If not, there is still time to refocus and make room for Christ this Christmas, today!

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The Promise of Christmas – Greg Laurie

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God promised this Good News long ago through his prophets in the holy Scriptures. The Good News is about his Son. . . —Romans 1:2–3

I have always believed in the promise of Christmas. There is something very special, wonderful, even magical (in the best use of that word) at this time of year. And that goes back to my earliest childhood.

With Christmas, we have a sense of wonder, beauty, and anticipation. We look forward to being with loved ones, family and friends, and eating incredible food. It is a wonderful time of the year. It is also a time that is marked, for the most part, by an absence of meanness. There is a kindness that people will demonstrate toward one another, even strangers.

But here is the question: Does Christmas really deliver on its promises? It does sometimes—a little bit here and a little bit there. But for the most part, Christmas doesn’t really deliver. In fact, what it does deliver is a lot of difficulty. If you are a man, your blood pressure will go up dramatically at this time of the year. A study was done by a British psychologist who found that Christmas shopping is actually hazardous for men’s health, due to its elevating effects on blood pressure. The same study also revealed that women’s blood pressure remained unaffected by the holiday shopping ritual.

So what is Christmas at its worst? It is a crass, commercial, empty, exhausting, and very expensive event that drags on for months at a time. And what is Christmas at its best? It is a glimpse of something that is coming: the beauty . . . the wonderful music . . . the adoring angels . . . the love . . . the warmth . . . the promise . . . the hope. Because when you get down to it, Christmas is a promise. It is a promise of things to come.

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Simply Wrapped – Greg Laurie

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And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger. —Luke 2:12

Some people will go to great lengths to wrap a Christmas gift. They will create beautiful, ornate packages. I have no wrapping ability whatsoever. My wrapped packages look horrible. For men, wrapping paper is merely an obstacle to keep us from what we really want. We don’t care about wrapping paper. We just want to know what’s inside the package.

God’s gift did not come to us in elaborate wrapping; it came in simple wrapping. Jesus was born in Bethlehem in a very humble environment. Think how difficult the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem was for Mary and Joseph. Then when they arrived, they had to stay in a little stable or cave where the animals were kept. The manger was just a feeding trough for the animals. And I think that place was very cold that night. I think it smelled like any other stable. It was a very unsanitary environment in which to bring a child into the world.

I don’t say that to detract from the beauty of Christmas. Rather, I say it to add to the beauty of what God did for us. The Creator of the universe, the Almighty God who spoke creation into existence, came and humbled himself to become a little baby, born in a stable in Bethlehem.

He was not laid in the manger in satin sheets, but in rags. He was not laid in a bed of gold, befitting a king, but in a feeding trough for animals. There He was—the greatest gift of all—in simple wrapping. Jesus took His place in a manger so that we might have a home in heaven.

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God and Disappointment

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I struggled as a teenager growing up in Delhi. Failure was writ large on my life. My dad basically looked at me and said, “You know, you’re going to be a huge embarrassment to the family—one failure after another.” And he was right given the way I was headed. I wanted to get out of everything I was setting my hand to, and I lacked discipline.(1)

During this time, India was at war and the defense academy was looking for general duties pilots to be trained. So I applied and I went to be interviewed, which involved an overnight train journey from the city of Delhi. It was wintertime and we were outside freezing for about five days as we went through physical endurance and other tests. There were three hundred applicants; they were going to select ten. On the last day they put their selection of names out on the board, and I was positioned number three.

I phoned my family and said, “You aren’t going to believe this. I’m going to make it. I’m number three. The only thing that’s left is the interview. The psychological testing is tomorrow, and I’ll be home.”

The next morning I began my interview with the chief commanding officer, who looked to me like Churchill sitting across the table. He asked me question after question. Then he said, “Son, I’m going to break your heart today.” He continued, “I’m going to reject you. I’m not going to pass you in this test.”

“May I ask you why, sir?” I replied.

“Yes. Psychologically, you’re not wired to kill. And this job is about killing.”

I felt that I was on the verge of wanting to prove him wrong—but I knew better, both for moral reasons and for his size! I went back to my room and didn’t talk to anybody. I packed my bags, got into the train, and arrived in Delhi. My parents and friends were waiting at the platform with garlands and sweets in their hands to congratulate me. No one knew. I thought to myself, “How do I even handle this? Where do I even begin?” They were celebrating, and yet for me, it was all over.

Or so I thought.

I was to discover later that God is the Grand Weaver of our lives. Every thread matters and is there for a purpose. Had I been selected, I would have had to commit twenty years to the Indian armed forces. It was the very next year that my father had the opportunity to move to Canada. My brother and I moved there as the first installment, and the rest of them followed. It was there I was in business school and God redirected my path to theological training. It was there that I met my wife, Margie; there my whole life changed. The rest is history. Had I been in the Indian Air Force, who knows what thread I’d have pulled to try to wreck the fabric.

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and God has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our lives. It’s hard to understand at the time. Not one of us says, “I can hardly wait to see where this thread is going to fit.”  Rather, we say, “This is not the pattern I want.” Yet one day the Shepherd of our souls will put it all together—and give us an eternity to revel in the marvel of what God has done. Our Father holds the threads of the design, and I’m so immensely grateful that God is the Grand Weaver.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

(1) Excerpted and adapted from Ravi Zacharias’s The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).

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Reflections on X

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There are two ways to look at a mirror. This fairly unoriginal thought crossed my mind as I stood before my bathroom mirror focused on the spots I was wiping away, when my gaze suddenly shifted to a dark smudge under my eye. With one hand still cleaning the spots on the mirror, I tried to remove the spot under my eye with the other. It didn’t work; or at least, as I attempted to do both, I didn’t do either job well. You can’t look in a mirror and at a mirror at the same time.

Because the Christian scriptures are compared (among other striking images) to a mirror, the illustration seemed to be one worth contemplating. But instead of being stirred with thoughts and theology, I was caught off guard by the stirring of my own conscience.

Earlier that day, as I was reading a passage I can’t remember now, I thought to myself with a self-assured sigh:  “If only [so-and-so] were reading these verses, they would see their situation more clearly, and the thing they’re completely overlooking.” It is little wonder why I can’t remember the verses; I wasn’t looking in the mirror. My eyes had shifted elsewhere.

Jesus once asked, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” His question at once uncovers a familiar behavior, exposing our tendency to focus on the faults of others while remaining blind to our own. Jesus isolates the motive we disguise as concern—like a sword dividing bone and marrow. It obviously made an impression on the ones who first heard him say it; all four gospel writers make note of Jesus’s words.

In an essay titled “The Trouble With ‘X’”, C.S. Lewis writes candidly of this all too common human trait: the ability to see clearly “X” and “X’s” flaws while having a harder time with our own. “X” is whomever we find in our lives with characteristics that annoy or even grieve us. Each of us can readily name people with traits that keep them in the miserable state they’re in, even as they claim they want out. Or we can easily describe a person who is just generally difficult or moody or dishonest. Lewis’s rejoinder to our ability to state clearly the trouble with the many “X’s” in our lives is similar to Christ’s:  Realize that there are similar flaws in you. There is most certainly something that gives others the same feeling of despair that their flaws give you. Writes Lewis, “You see clearly enough that nothing […] can make ‘X’ really happy as long as ‘X’ remains envious, self-centred, and spiteful.” Be sure, he warns, that there is something also inside of you that, unless given to God to be altered, will remain similarly unscathed and unmoved.

The unique promise of a God who speaks into the world is that chaos is moved to order. Of course, this may mean first that chaos is simply revealed. God speaks and shows us our reflections, exposing the areas we are blind to and piercing our hearts with truth only a mirror can reveal.  But like a mirror, God’s words can also be looked at in more than one way. As I read the Bible that morning, my intentions were good—or at least nearly good—I thought. The verses made me think of someone important to me; a common occurrence, I suspect, amongst us all. Nonetheless, it was a moment like my experience at the bathroom mirror. I had shifted my eyes to someone else’s spots. I was looking to see something other than me. And examining God’s words for someone else is like looking at a mirror and seeing in all the spots a reflection other than your own.

To approach a speaking God with eyes searching and ears listening for everyone but ourselves is to cease to hear and see as God intended. “Anyone who listens to the word,” writes James, “but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (1:23-24). The choice is crucial. Of all the spotted reflections around us, there is only one you can really examine and see changed. Putting ourselves, and our spots, in God’s able hands is the most urgent use of the mirror.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Mysterious Exchange

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English mystery writer Agatha Christie is treasured for the detective stories that got her dubbed the “queen of crime.” Waxed moustache and all, Hercule Poirot, the professional sleuth who appears in more than thirty of her books, is considered one of the most enduring characters in fiction. He is remembered as the egotistical Belgian detective who solved multifaceted cases with the help of his “little grey cells”; he is also an amusing source of useful quotations. In one of his meticulous investigations, Poirot tells his sidekick, “There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation! A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.”(1)

If words betray the inmost secrets of our hearts, prayer is the conversation in which hidden things—and the one hiding—are most laid bare (but hardly in the same sense as Poirot imagined). God does not find things revealed as we speak; our words are not inspected for God’s own sake. The conversation is more of a mystery than this. God is the revealer; our own anemic words, God translates to ourselves.

In a poem simply titled “Prayer,” C.S. Lewis explores the mysterious exchange between human hearts and God when we pray.

Master, they say that when I seem

To be in speech with you,

Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream

—One talker aping two.

 

They are half right, but not as they

Imagine; rather, I

Seek in myself the things I meant to say,

And lo! The wells are dry.

 

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake

The Listener’s role, and through

My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake

The thoughts I never knew.

 

And thus you neither need reply

Nor can; thus, while we seem

Two talking, thou are One forever, and I

No dreamer, but thy dream.(2)

 

The Christian story purports a God who not only hears but also speaks on our behalf. Likewise, Paul writes, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words.

In prayer, as in a deep well, God probes the depths of us. As we grow in faith and conversation, we learn to put before God what is in us (and not what should be in us), unable to resist the opportunity to reveal ourselves and so be revealed. “God searches the sources of the rivers” said Job, “and brings hidden things to light” (28:11). Hinted at beyond our words are the sources of the rivers within us. Sometimes slowly, sometimes torrentially, these waters God makes known, plunging into areas that have grown stagnant, dredging streams and renewing life within us.

Moving among our words, whether unuttered or expressed, God shows us not only what we mean, but more importantly, the one who gives us meaning. Taking our broken thoughts and fragile lives, God stirs within the prayers of God’s own, searching hearts, revealing what is hidden, and showing us Father, Son, and Spirit.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders, 1936.

(2) Poems, Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), 122-123.