We live in a media-sodden time, where we are saturated with the latest news and technology. Every kind of entertainment imaginable is at our fingertips. Tonight I'm thinking about the season we are in -- Christmas and the coming New Year. We are bombarded with twin messages of perpetual hope and terrorists blowing up cities. We see all sorts of beautiful, meaningful videos of people doing compassionate things for others. In the next, we are getting locked and loaded to prepare for the coming apocalypse and civil war.
It seems to be our nature to live like pendulums, swinging from one extreme to another. There is good, bad, ugly, and everything in between. Some decry God, because there is so much evil in the world. The next group denies the fact that man can be evil -- and says we're all just victims of varying stripes. I see people that sugar-coat themselves in cloaks of seeming goodness, and then we discover that they are living dual lives that completely oppose what they say with their mouths. Then still others that don't even try to disguise their basest instincts and simply live like wild hedonists.
When I talk to people along my way, I am frequently told that they are Christians. They go to church, they said a magic prayer when they were 8, walked an aisle. They say they're doing pretty good, so they guess God will let them in when they show up at the pearly gates. They haven't murdered anyone, they try to be a good citizen, pay their taxes, take their turn at grocery aisles.
Is this all there is?
When I read the Scriptures, this is not what I observe. I see traitors, adulterers, cheaters, frauds, murderers and some really bad folk, along with a few amazing ones. And such were some of us. God apparently doesn't discriminate about who He has included in that hallowed tome. He puts all of them in there, really embarrassing ones too. If you dig deep, though, there's reasons for it and a larger message than is usually seen at first glance. It just kills me when people pick random verses out to prove a point. You need to embrace the whole book, to really understand.
And that's what I've been thinking about, these last few weeks of holiday stress, coupled with sickness and too much work piled up. Under these circumstances, my icky self shows itself in new, delightful ways. Hurried, sick, overstretched, over-committed, under-funded, unattended house and laundry... then somebody lobs several containers of Christmas decorations on the living room rug. I can see dog hair floating through the air (she's chewing herself to pieces) and nobody's told my hormones to quit throwing gasoline on the fire. I go from sweating bullets to freezing in ten minute increments. Night and day. So what comes to the surface? All my sweet sugar thoughts of perpetual hope. Now I really am lying.
Nope. This is when I see and experience the enduring goodness of God. Because He knows what the heart, my heart, is capable of. I am a sinner. A cracked miscreant who came here yelling and screaming and still wants to default to that same modus operandi. I think I'm pretty good, until I muse upon those infamous ten commandments. In some fashion or another, I've broken most of those, if not all. So is my scale tipping just enough that my good outweighs my bad? Really? I want to think so. In the end I know that even my thoughts have cracks in them.
But this is hope: He came in the form of a sinless baby, child, man. He was God and man, all wrapped up in one. Perfection. God humbled Himself and became a man, and then gave His life as payment, redemption, for the sins of His people. So now I'm not standing in my own stead or my own limp imitation of perfection. He's standing in for me. His life, His death, His resurrection. I trusted Him when I was a child, and I'm never going to be perfect this side of heaven. I mess up, well, all the time. That doesn't excuse it. I don't live my life excusing my behavior or my sin because I've got a pass. But I do live my life now in a place of gratefulness....knowing that any good that I do, He is doing it through and in spite of, me. That's what the Christmas baby is really about.
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