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A Moment of Weakness – Charles Stanley

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2 Samuel 11:1-5

We all face key moments of decision, when our actions can lead to lasting consequences. The issue is, will you be ready when such a time comes?

David wasn’t prepared for the moment of decision that suddenly faced him. At a time when he was restless, lonely, and preoccupied with worries, temptation and sin caught him unprepared. We can guard ourselves against these moments of weakness by remembering one simple word: H-A-L-T.

First, never allow yourself to get too hungry. When the body is weak from lack of food, poor decisions are likely to follow. Respect your body and provide the sustenance it needs.

Second, don’t permit yourself to get too angry. Anger can cloud judgment and lead to regrettable decisions.

A third caution is not to let yourself become too lonely. When you feel isolated, you may find yourself willing to do almost anything to feel accepted or loved.

Fourth, don’t allow yourself to get too tired. Sleep is essential for wise decisions. When you deprive your mind and body of its necessary “down time,” poor choices become probable.

Being wise in these four areas can prevent thoughts of “If only I hadn’t . . .” later on.

Commit now never to make important decisions when you are too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Instead, be honest at those times and admit you’re unprepared to make sound judgments. Then delay the decision until you can approach it with prayer, patience, and godly wisdom.

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All Things New – Max Lucado

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Can an acorn become a rose? Can a whale fly like a bird?  Can lead become gold?  I don’t think so!

My dad’s a doctor.  My grandfather’s a doctor and everyone expects ME to be a doctor—but I want to study music!  God—what am I missing?

You can’t be anything you want to be.  But you can be everything God wants you to be.  If God didn’t pack within you the people skills of a salesperson, or the world vision of an ambassador, can you be one?  An unhappy, dissatisfied one—maybe! God doesn’t pre-fab or mass-produce people.

Revelation 21:5 says God makes all things new!  He didn’t hand you your granddad’s bag or your aunt’s life; he personally and deliberately packed you!  Live out of the bag God gave you.  Enjoy making music!

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Undone – Ravi Zacharias

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The Oxford University Press “Word of the Year” is an honor bestowed on a new or old word that is chosen for its representation of the year’s cultural milieu. Considered for this past year’s awards in the UK or the US were words such as “nomophobia” (anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone—from no and mo(bile) + phobia), “YOLO” (an acronym for you only live once) and the related “FOMO” (the fear of missing out on a social event), “second screening” (the activity of watching television whilst simultaneously using a smartphone, laptop, etc.), “selfie” (a picture of oneself taken from a smartphone and uploaded to a social media site), and “bashtagging” (using a company’s promotional hashtag on Twitter to criticize or complain about the company, rather than endorse it). Similarly tech-savvy is the word that was chosen as the US word of the year, an evolving relic of the 1980s that has “never been trendier,” according to Katherine Martin, Head of the US Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press.(1) “GIF,” an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, pronounced jif, is a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations.

Much has been said recently on the influences of technology, social media culture, twitter feeds, and smartphones; on the ways we obtain, retain, and proclaim information; on the ways we interact with each other and on the ways in which we think as a result of it. Many of the shortlisted choices for the UK and US words of the year demonstrate how we are adapting linguistically; it is perhaps ironic that a dictionary should choose to praise words that are driven by a need to use fewer words—texting shorthand, programming acronyms, and twitter-speak. Studies on information behavior such as one conducted by scholars from University College London suggests that we may well be in the midst of a reprogramming of the way we read and think.(2) Some of their observations are fascinating; others are causing due alarm. However we choose to look at it, technology is unquestionably shaping the way we see the world.

As someone who spends a great deal of time on the computer writing and editing, one of my most cherished and simple technological functions continues to be the ability to “undo” something. With the flip of two fingers—one on “command” and the other on the letter “z”—I can remove the sentence I just added to the page, take back the word that did not quite fit, or reverse the effect of every previous command and restore my document to its original condition. No matter how many actions I have taken on the page, I can undo every one of them—and this is often useful! Technologically, it is a feature to which I have grown quite accustomed—so much so, that I find myself believing haphazardly that nothing is ever really lost, and that everything can be undone, erased, or retrieved. More so, I cannot begin to calculate how many times I have thought about this function when I have needed it in places far from my computer screen. I picture my fingers snapping up scenes in my day as if my life was on a screen being edited.

Of course, reality never takes long to jar me back into a world with vastly different rules of operation. We cannot undo words that have already been said or take back actions that were less opportune than we anticipated. Hindsight, by definition, is a vision that is no longer available to us, no matter how urgently we would turn back time and undo what has been done. Our actions and inactions, words, lies, and blind spots cannot be expunged like a spreadsheet or a document. Here, the Christian resolve that our “yes” be our “yes,” that consequences be weighed, and the cost of our action or inaction be counted at the outset is a far wiser and practical vision. And of course, it is far harder work. “But which of you,” asks Christ, “intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?… Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?”(3)

Warning the crowds to count the costs of following him, Jesus spoke in terms that would cause the faint and the indecisive to run. He also begged them to see that how we live, what we do and say, matters deeply and cannot be undone. We cannot undo foolish words spoken in anger, the regret of a lost opportunity, or the act of walking away from someone in need. Nor can we undo a life that missed the cultivation of a nearby Christ while we had our hands on other plows. But we can choose to live dynamically today. Jesus bids us to fashion our legacy from this day forward, ever looking to the one who is in fact able to undo a life that is anything less.

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

(1) “Word Of The Year 2012: ‘GIF’, According To Oxford American Dictionaries,” Huffington Post, November 12, 2012. See also “Oxford Dictionaries UK Word of the Year 2012,” November 13, 2012, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/uk-word-of-the-year-2012/, accessed December 1, 2012.

(2) “Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future,” University College London Online Briefing, January 11 2008, http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf, accessed October 1, 2008.

(3) Luke 14:28,31.

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Prayer for a Future Me – Ravi Zacharias

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While thoughts and resolutions for the year ahead are crossing many of our minds, Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios are still thinking 30 years into the future. Sly and Patrikios are the minds behind the 2002 website “Future Me” that allows people to send messages to themselves years or decades from the time they were written. In the year 2015, a man named Adam is set to get an e-mail from himself that asks, “Do you still write? Do you still draw? Does Radio Shack still exist?” Sly explains the rationale: “We want people to think about their future and what their goals and dreams and hopes and fears are. We’re trying to facilitate some serious existential pondering.”(1)

A quick overview of some of the publicly-posted messages shows people doing just that. Some are pondering dreams they hope to have accomplished by the time they hear from themselves in the future: “I hope you are moving up in your job… I also hope you are making more responsible choices.” Others are taking it as a moment to remind themselves what they were up to years earlier or record what they hope will be beyond them in the future: “I hope you’re better because as I’m writing this letter, you’re doing terrible.” It is a time capsule wrought in an e-mail, readily drawing in participants all over the world. At the very least, it extracts in many a sense of intrigue. At most, sending words to future selves seems to draw a sense of nostalgia, accountability, apprehension, or hope.

I used to keep a journal that mostly held thoughts and events consumed with present days. I seemed most prone to write in it when something was happening or had just happened, when something was on my mind or on my heart at present. But there is one page far in the back that differentiated from the others. In scattered sentences now crammed on a page full of thoughts I speak to days far ahead of me: “Remember that you wanted to be the kind of woman that grows old gracefully.” “If you ever become a parent, I hope you will be the kind who can say ‘I’m sorry.’” “When it’s time to let go of certain freedoms, take it with poise.” “If it’s ever your turn to face disease, remember that you wanted to do it with faith; you wanted death never to scare you more than resurrection gives you hope.” While I like to think of these mental notes as prayers for the future—and many of them are—many of them more closely resemble a listing of fears, an anxious warning at what I might forget or what might go wrong. Though I am looking ahead, it is as if I am still looking behind me.

In an essay titled “Please Shut This Gate” English author F.W. Boreham describes signs carefully placed by landowners throughout the landscape of New Zealand. “Please shut this gate,” was a message one could read often throughout his countryside, signs placed by fence owners intent on keeping some things from wandering away and some things from wandering in. Depicting this common scene, Boreham then draws a parallel to the importance of shutting similar gates in our own lives, closing the door that keeps things both in and out. He writes, “[W]hen Israel escaped from Babylon, and dreaded a similar attack from behind, the voice divine again reassured them. ‘I, the Lord thy God, will be thy rearguard’ (Isaiah 58:8). There are thousands of things behind me of which I have good reason to be afraid; but it is the glory of the Christian evangel that all the gates may be closed. It is grand to be able to walk in green pastures and beside still waters unafraid of anything that I have left in the perilous fields behind me.”(2)

Whether looking down roads to the New Year or the coming decades, it is the gift of the follower of Jesus that there are gates that may be closed. We need not worry about the future, nor look to resolutions or future me’s with fear of failing, nor tremble at what Christ has put behind us—or in front of us. In the words of a seventeenth century Puritan: “To suppose that whatever God requireth of us we have power of ourselves to do is to make the Cross and grace of Jesus Christ of none effect.”(3) Christ has written a message across the future to be delivered to our laboring souls each new day. As he went head first into the shadows of self-giving, he cried, “It is finished,” forever offering a door to shut, forever promising the strength to shut it. In this New Year, one can say in hope and in light: Christ has gone before us, he walks among us, he is our rearguard, he is our strength.

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

(1) Matt Sly and Jay Patrikios, Futureme.org.

(2) F.W. Boreham, “Please Shut This Gate,” The Silver Shadow (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1919), 118-119.

(3) John Owen, Works of John Owen: Volume 3 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1862), 433.

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Life, Death, and Incarnation – Ravi Zacharias

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The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is one of the world’s largest maximum-security prisons, an eighteen-thousand acre habitat to people who have committed horrible crimes. It houses roughly five thousand inmates, more than half of which are serving life sentences. Death looms large at Angola; ninety-four percent of inmates who enter are expected to die while incarcerated. The fear of dying alone in prison, coupled with the reality that for many inmates their first encounter with death was committing murder, makes death a weighted subject, often locked up in anger, guilt, and dread.

For a few inmates, however, the Angola Hospice volunteer program has drastically changed this. In 1998, equipped with a variety of staff trustees and inmate volunteers, the LSP hospice opened its doors to its first terminally ill inmate. Today it is recognized as one of the best programs of its kind. Giving inmate volunteers a role in the creation of the hospice and the primary care during the dying process, inmates find themselves in the position to tangibly affect the lives of others for good. Reckoning with death as a fate that awaits all of humanity as they care for dying friends and strangers, prisoners gradually let go of hardened demeanors. One inmate notes, “I’ve seen guys that used to run around Angola, and want to fight and drug up, actually cry and be heartbroken over the patient.”(1) Another describes being present in the lives of the dying and how much this takes from the living. “But it puts a lot in you,” he adds. A third inmate describes how caring for strangers on the brink of death has put an end to his lifelong anger and helped him to confront his guilt with honesty.

It may seem for some an odd story as a means of examining the story of Christmas, but in some ways it is the only story to ever truly introduce the story of Christmas: broken, guilty souls longing for someone to be present. As martyred archbishop Oscar Romero once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those most aware they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas. For the prisoners at Angola who stare death in the eyes and realize the tender importance of presence, for the child whose mother left and whose father was never there, for the melancholic soul that laments the evils of a fallen world, the Incarnation is the only story that touches every pain, every lost hope, every ounce of our guilt, every joy that ever matters. Where other creeds fail, Christmas, in essence, is about coming poor and weary, guilty and famished to the very scene in history where God reached down and touched the world by stepping into it.

The Incarnation is hard to dismiss out of hand because it so radically comes near our needs. Into the world of lives and deaths, the arrival of Christ as a child turns fears of isolation, weakness, and condemnation on their heads. C.S. Lewis describes the doctrine of the Incarnation as a story that gets under our skin unlike any other creed, religion, or theory. “[The Incarnation] digs beneath the surface, works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels, harmonises best with our deepest apprehensions… and undermines our superficial opinions. It has little to say to the man who is still certain that everything is going to the dogs, or that everything is getting better and better, or that everything is God, or that everything is electricity. Its hour comes when these wholesale creeds have begun to fail us.”(2) Standing over the precipices of the things that matter, nothing matters more than that there is a loving, forgiving, eager God who draws near.

The great hope of the Incarnation is that God comes for us. God is present and Christ is aware, and it changes everything. “[I]f accepted,” writes Lewis, “[the Incarnation] illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die,…[and] covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected.”(3) The coming of Christ as an infant in Bethlehem puts flesh on humanity’s worth and puts God in humanity’s weakness. To the captive, there is no other freedom.

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

(1) Stephen Kiernan, Last Rights (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2006), 274.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Complete C.S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 282.

(3) Ibid.

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Cynical Christmas – Ravi Zacharias

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It is the task of marketing departments of all varieties to keep a calculating finger on the pulse of culture, particularly when it comes to consumer trends. The entertainment industry alone has a multi-billion dollar reason to keep their fingers close—which means their research into the entertainment needs of the world is essential. For those of us fascinated with cultural studies, it also means their research into what the public will respond to favorably or unfavorably offers an interesting glimpse into the current cultural landscape.

But even the researchers are getting confused, and especially during the holidays. They find we are sending mixed signals. An article in The New York Times quotes one researcher describing “a curiously widespread contradiction in modern American pop culture—the desperate, self-negating need to be both cynical and sentimental at the same time.”(1) Film historian David Thomson notes of film in general, “One of the main problems in the industry is that young kids do not take the story material seriously. They think it’s mocking.” As a result, “the things we once took very seriously, we half-mock them now.”(2)

 

By and large, the cultural trend marks a growing distrust and rejection of story and meaning and a general embrace of cynicism. And yet, in recent market research, executives found that audiences of all ages reacted badly to advertising that too sharply dismissed or disrespected the notion or story of Christmas. There is quite measurably a greater desire for storylines with hopeful implications in December. Apparently, we want to joke about life’s meaninglessness, but only 11 months out of the year. The typical cynicism governing the production and marketing of motion pictures is entirely toned down at Christmastime. It seems we want to argue the cake doesn’t exist and eat it too.

I have always appreciated the brave confession of C.S. Lewis that he was once living in a whirl of contradictions. This is a difficult thing even to notice of one’s life, let alone to admit it aloud. Self-deception is always one of the more powerful forces of interpretation; the general human ability to see the lives of others far more critically than our own is another. Yet Lewis observed of himself, “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.” Our own contradictions often exist glaringly amongst our thoughts, even as they go unnoticed.

Yet there is a promise for those who will seek, for those willing to confront their own contradictions, and it comes near in the Incarnation we celebrate in December—the event remembering God’s willingness to reach humanity by becoming human, exaltating humanity into the life of God. Indeed, this exalted one who knows what it means to be human is continually at work flattening our altars of inconsistency, uncovering our contradictions, urging us into eyesight, and leading us into humanity as God intended. The child we welcome in December remains among us every month thereafter. In the momentous words of a hymn that speaks much to the hope Christmas:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King…

Let men their songs employ…

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make his blessings flow

Far as the curse is found.

Perhaps we are right to exchange cynicism for hope this Christmas. Might we learn to employ its songs long after the season.

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

(1) As quoted in the New York Times, (Dec. 14, 2004).

(2) Ibid.

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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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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).