Book: Psalms

Beloved, the Church is the only place where people can find true healing and refuge from the failings of a fallen world. We have an obligation to stand as outposts of truth and sanity amid a culture that is losing its collective grip on reality. This requires the Church to no longer abandon her simple duty to point out what is right and wrong, even when it is “controversial.” Our call to embrace the incarnate life, then, is to accept our duty as the Church – to be the hands and feet of Christ in our communities.

We have become a country untethered from the immutable Truth that a loving Father created us to know, love, and serve Him in this life, which alone is the assured path to our happiness in eternal life. We indeed have perpetual amnesia about this fact (including a majority of those in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” who claim to be Christians).

When we focus on Christ instead of complaining about the many hardships in our lives, we become a witness to the Gospel. Our lives become saturated with the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding. This doesn’t make any sense if you don’t know Christ! This is how Spafford could write a hymn praising the Lord mere days after all his children died in a shipwreck.

Obedience to God is the only way to true happiness. But in order to trust and obey God, we must first abandon our pride and admit that we are no longer going to do things “our way.” Only when we begin boast in the Lord and not in ourselves will we know the joy of salvation and help others to find their way to God.

What can the US debt ceiling teach us about the Christian life? It demonstrates the attitude of our wider culture, even among Christians. We have no desire to do the hard work of self-examination and repentance. We don’t want to embrace the struggle of a life of holiness, following Christ. We just want more stuff! We want to be comfortable, and we don’t want to be reminded that we must be holy, just as God is holy.

Secular culture espouses many useless sayings which may make us feel good but are devoid of meaning because they deny the power and reality of the Triune God. The expectation of Christians is not to merely be nice or say nice things – it is to be kind, persist in prayer, and to boldly speak about our faith. What good is our faith if we don’t tell anyone about it?

The Epiphany has not ended; it shines forth to this day, radiating out from the day of Christ’s Incarnation; it is the very reason we as Gentiles can share in the riches of Christ’s inheritance. This means that we who have received this light have the responsibility to both continually seek its source and reflect it so that others may do the same.

God spoke the universe into existence. God created all we can and cannot see. This same Divinity broke into time and space, born of a Pure Virgin, to save all of humanity. But we in our folly refuse to accept this glorious truth while at the same time believing we will make science fiction a reality. This contradiction must not be so for the professing Christian.

The mystery of the Incarnation – literally “taking on flesh”, that Christ Jesus, fully human yet fully divine, was born of a pure Virgin – that mystery reminds us that the God of the universe is real, and He loves us so much that he chose to be born among us, that he may sympathize with our weaknesses and perfectly redeem all the pain and suffering we face in life.