Putting More Merry into Your Christmas

Christmas cheer isn't always easy to come by. 

Yet Christmas cheer is what the angel announced to the shepherds. 

“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

The content of the good news of great joy is the key to putting more merry in your Christmas. 

Unto you is born a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

That means that no matter how wrong things feel this Christmas, what's wrong will be made right. But it also means that no matter how right things are for you, a day is coming when what's right will be made infinitely better. 

He is a Savior. He saves us from our sins. 

He is the Christ, the king who rules forever, the Lord.

God wins. We win. Everybody can win.

We forget this. Sometimes we don't understand it. We're like a small child who has inherited millions but is crying over a broken toy. 

Sometimes we feel the cheer, and we're tempted to think it doesn't get any better than this. Think again. It gets infinitely better. We're still paying with broken toys. 

A new day is coming. Jesus is coming. We need not be overcome by what's wrong now, as painful and sorrow filled as it might be. We need not give our entire focus to our broken toys.

But we dare not hold to tightly to what's right now. It's only a foretaste of something infinitely better.

Merry Christmas!

Leadership and the Trinity

I'm reading Leadership Mosaic: 5 Leadership Principles for Ministry and Everyday Life by Daniel Montgomery and Jared Kennedy. As I read, I'll do a series of blog posts of short, tweet-length quotes. If you want to join me in reading it, you can get it here and send me some of your favorite quotes.  These quotes are from the Introduction.

  • Leadership Mosaic is a look at how the gospel and biblical theology provide us with five reliable principles of leadership.
  • We’ve moved from a merely complicated world to a complex and unpredictable one.
  • It’s frustrating when old ways of leading stop working.
  • When we look to the Bible, we shouldn’t merely look for a theology of leadership. We must look for the Trinitarian God who leads.
  • Leadership at its source is relational and not merely functional. As Christians, we don’t simply lead like God. We lead with God.
  • The Trinity is our mosaic. The triune God himself, the Master, is our master image.
  • Leadership is knowing where people need to go and taking the initiative to get them there in God’s way and by God’s power.