Recapturing the Glories of Christmas

Christmas is such a glorious time when you’re a kid. You don’t have to do anything to enjoy Christmas. You don’t have to work at it. You just love it.

I’m not sure when it happens, but at some point, as you get older, you start having to work at recovering the glories of Christmas.

And we need glory. We need awe and wonder in our lives. Studies show it makes us less selfish and more connected to others. 

We spend a lot of time during the Christmas season trying to recover the glories of Christmas past because we need glory in our lives. But the true glory of Christmas isn’t found in Christmases past; the true glory of Christmas is found in Christmas’ Christ. 

What is it about Christmas’ Christ that evokes awe and wonder?

Angels announce his coming…
He brings salvation. God wins, we win, everybody can win.
He is the eternal king.
He is the culmination of a long story, the story of God. 
He is God, taking on flesh and blood and moving into the neighborhood!
Enough wonder and awe in all that?

How can we experience his glory? It starts by finding Christ and then focusing on Christ. But ultimately the experience of his glory is on him.

A couple of weeks ago my son from Louisville and his family came to my Saturday hangout, Black Sheep Coffee Cafe. Like most Saturdays, a blue grass group was playing. Each time they finished a song and people clapped, my granddaughter would look up with a big smile, thinking everyone was clapping for her. 

Ultimately the experience of Christ's glory is on him because he promises to share his glory with his followers. He, in his glory, gets all the applause; we get to bask in his glory. 

Leadership and Convictions

I'm reading Leadership Mosaic: 5 Leadership Principles for Ministry and Everyday Life by Daniel Montgomery and Jared Kennedy. As I read, I'm doing 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 chapter 1, "The Convictional Leader: Embodying What You Believe.

• Wisdom for leadership begins with the conviction that God speaks. God makes himself known through his world, Word, and works.
• Methodological pragmatism focuses churches and missionary enterprises on “what works”…rather than on faithfulness to God’s Word.
• A value is something to which you will commit, but conviction is a belief you’ll sacrifice for.
• We long to know because we’ve been created to know God and his world. 
• Have you noticed how defensive Christian leaders can be? Have you noticed how we often choose sides before we understand an issue? 
• Before we begin to explore leadership truth from those fields, we should confess God’s sovereignty over them. 
• God wants to move us from the drudgery of mastering it all to the joy of mystery— the joy of discovery.
• Convictional leaders haven’t mastered the Bible. The Bible has mastered them.
• Listening for God’s voice in his world is hard for us, because as leaders (and sinners) we like to hear ourselves talk.
• Painfully, we learned that having convictions sometimes means losing friends and letting go of some dreams.