President Biden hosted the annual White House Hanukkah Party last night; invitees included Holocaust survivors and leaders from across Jewish religious denominations. However, I’m thinking today of different ceremonies held recently in dark places: some eight hundred menorahs from Israeli children who were evacuated from the area around Gaza were delivered to IDF soldiers fighting in the Gaza Strip. As they lit these candles on the front lines, families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas held their own Hanukkah observance in Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, in another moving act of solidarity, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lit the first candle on a huge menorah in front of Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate. “I wish that the candle of Hanukkah will shine far beyond this square and much longer than just for the eight days of Hanukkah,” he said while wearing a black velvet skullcap.

As Jews around the world grieve the atrocities of Hamas’s October 7 invasion, global solidarity with them both as a people and as a nation is vitally significant.

However, there’s a problem with conflating the two, one we urgently need to understand in our conflicted day.

When one day of oil lasted eight days

Hanukkah originated in the second century BC when Greco-Syrian rulers took over the Jewish temple and outlawed Judaism. Judah the Maccabee led his fellow Jews to defeat one of the mightiest armies on the earth, drive them from the land, and reclaim the temple. However, when they sought to light its menorah (the seven-branched candelabrum), they could find only a single cruse of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks.

Miraculously, when they lit the menorah, the one-day supply of oil lasted for eight days until new oil could be prepared under conditions of ritual purity. To commemorate and publicize this miracle, Jewish leaders instituted the festival of Hanukkah (meaning “dedication” and pointing to the rededication of the temple).

Jews around the world are observing that miracle this week. Some are deeply devout, living daily by the 613 laws of Judaism. Others are less so. Still others are secular, identifying with Judaism as their race rather than their religion. But all are united in their commitment to their people and to the tiny nation that was founded to ensure their survival.

This conflation of race and religion is typical for other religions as well. Most Muslims were born into Islam. The same holds true for Buddhists and Hindus. Their religion is a component of their family origin and, likely, their racial demographic.

Unfortunately, many think the same is true for Christianity—including many Christians.

What people don’t understand about Christianity

Do you ever wonder why so many wars are fought in the name of religion?

The present conflict in the Middle East is one example: Hamas is convinced that Allah intends them to have the same land Jews are convinced Yahweh promised to them. Skeptics often point to religious wars waged across human history as evidence that religion does more harm than good.

Here’s what they’re missing: true Christianity is not a religion about God but a deeply personal, transformational relationship with him.

Jesus was adamant: “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). When a person places their personal faith in him as their personal Redeemer, they become a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Peter said of this experience: “According to [God’s] great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). When we ask Christ to forgive our sin and become our Lord, he makes us into the “children of God” (John 1:12).

Now, when we submit our lives to his indwelling Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16; Ephesians 5:18), the Spirit makes us more like Christ (Romans 8:29) by manifesting his character in and through our lives (cf. Galatians 5:22–23). As we worship, pray, study Scripture, and live biblically, we grow in grace as the new people of God (2 Peter 3:18).

Such people love their enemies and pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:44). If they are walking in the Spirit, they do not initiate conflict but seek to advance justice and peace (Micah 6:8; Matthew 5:6, 9).

What “hinders our spiritual life more than anything else”?

You knew these theological truths before I recounted them. However, we must beware the same temptation that adherents of religion face.

I define religion as the human attempt to please and secure the blessing of God (or the gods). We choose to attend services at a church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or shrine and to invest money and time in religious activities. All of this is on our terms, done as we wish. All the while, we hope that God (or the gods) will reward our religiosity with benefits that outweigh its costs.

Since 85 percent of the planet’s population identifies as “religious,” I just described nearly seven billion people. How is transactional religion working for the world?

Oswald Chambers observed, “The characteristics of individuality are independence and self-assertiveness. It is the continual assertion of individuality that hinders our spiritual life more than anything else.” This is why, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

During this Advent week of peace, if you would know true peace, trade a transactional religion about Jesus for a transforming relationship with him. Submit all that you have and are to him as a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). Ask him to take away anything that is not his best for you and add anything that is. Ask his Spirit to make you more like Jesus than you have ever been before. And know that he delights to answer your prayer, to the glory of God.

Watchman Nee said, “A born-again person ought to possess unspeakable peace in the spirit.”

Do you?

If not, why not?

Denison Forum

With the continuing wars in Ukraine and Israel, political unrest, and a seemingly endless supply of reminders that we live in a fallen, broken world, it’s understandable that many have begun to wonder more openly if we are living in the end times. But while those questions are worth asking, we shouldn’t let them distract us from the fact that God is still moving in ways that often resemble Acts far more than Revelation.

I needed that reminder this week and found it in a recent profile of pastor Somphon Sriwichai’s work in Thailand.

Sriwichai’s story starts when, as a baby, he got sick and both the local shaman and traditional healers failed to help him get better. In desperation, his father took him to a Buddhist temple and made a vow to the statue of Buddha that if his child was healed, he would dedicate him to the temple’s service. Sriwichai began to get better shortly thereafter and, when he turned eight, went to live at the temple, later joining as a novice monk.

Life as a novice was difficult for a child, however, and when he turned nineteen Sriwichai left and moved back home with his father. Shortly thereafter, he began to hang out with criminals, drug dealers, and murderers, eventually joining one of the local gangs.

His life took a dramatic turn, however, when at twenty-nine he had an unlikely encounter with a group of local Christians.

“What kind of party is that?”

As Sriwichai describes it, “I was drinking heavily and using drugs with a friend when we heard people singing. ‘What kind of party is that?’ I asked. He answered, ‘That’s not a party, those are Christians.’ Curious, I decided to check it out.”

Sriwichai goes on to tell of how he wandered into the meeting drunk, high, and looking more like a threat than a potential convert. But despite his state, the group’s leader welcomed him in and shared the gospel with him. What struck him most was the grace and forgiveness that stood in such stark contrast to the karmic understanding of the world he’d grown up with.

As he remembers it, “I knew that, according to my own religion, I was destined to be reborn into one of the levels of hell because of the bad things I had done. I began to wonder about this grace and to hope for this forgiveness.” The leader went on to pray with him and Sriwichai “began to weep” and “sensed that my many sins had been forgiven. I had been changed but did not know what to do next.”

It was not until he came across another group of Christians three months later in Chiang Mai that the seeds of faith planted that night began to grow into a real relationship with the Lord.

Sriwichai eventually went through three months of Bible training before embarking upon a life of gospel work that more resembles those very first generations of believers nearly two thousand years ago than what most of us in the West experience today.

Whether it’s receiving visions from God that guided him to the city where he still serves, gaining credibility with the lost by praying for and healing a local shaman, or serving his community by caring for the refugees and children at risk of human trafficking, Sriwichai’s life testifies to the continued power of the gospel to transform lives and cultures today just as it did in the first century.

The entire profile is worth reading, and I encourage you to take the time to do so. But in reflecting on his story, there’s one point in particular that I’d like to focus on today.

Embrace hope

This week we have been discussing the advent theme of hope. In a day where suicide continues to rise as one of the leading causes of death and each day brings new reasons for despair, when we respond with hope rather than anger or fear it stands out. However, for hope to work it must be more than a naïve ignorance of the world around us.

The early Christians harbored no illusions as to the depravity and difficulty they would face as they lived out the gospel in a culture that showed little interest in abiding by God’s standards. Yet they did not let that opposition rob them of the hope they found in Christ. And the same should be true for us today.

So on the days when it feels like we’re living in Revelation, choose to embrace the hope of Acts. Then approach each day with the knowledge that you have the same Holy Spirit in you that has helped believers from Paul and Peter to Somphon Sriwichai change their world with the gospel.

How can you follow their example today?

Denison Forum