Visual Christmas Story

This video from the Skit Guys tells the Great Story at a swift pace.  Watch and wonder.  "Come, thou long-expected Jesus!"
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A Good Word on a Dark Day

I appreciate John Piper's reflections on the suffering Savior on this day when violence struck Newtown, Connecticut.
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Christmas Contentment

 
It’s especially fitting at Christmas time to reflect on Pastor Jeremiah Burroughs’s 1648 book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment.  “Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition” (p. 19—note “every”).

There’s a “mystery of contentment” (ch. 2):  “It may be said of one who is contented in a Christian way that he is the most contented man in the world, and yet the most unsatis­fied man in the world; these two together must needs be mysterious” (p. 42).  “Mark, here lies the mystery of it, A little in the world will content a Christian for his passage, but all the world, and ten thousand times more, will not content a Christian for his portion” (p. 43).

This “passage/portion” distinction is really crucial.  It's like the interplay of Philippians 3 and Philippians 4:  in ch. 3 Paul is all restlessness and striving—discontent because he can’t get enough of Jesus (so he “presses on” to know Christ more fully); but in ch. 4 Paul is restful, at peace, non-anxious, joyful in the Lord, and content whether he has plenty or faces poverty.  The key is choosing your pleasures wisely: “If God gave you not only earth but heaven, that you should rule over sun, moon and stars, and have the rule over the highest of the sons of men, it would not be enough to satisfy you, unless you had God himself” (p. 43).

As for trusting God with your situation in life, Burroughs says this:  “Here lies the bottom and root of all con­tentment, when there is an evenness and proportion between our hearts and our circumstances” (p. 46).  Thus a believing heart thinks this way:  “The Lord has been pleased to bring down my circumstances; now if the Lord brings down my heart and makes it equal to my circum­stances, then I am well enough” (p. 46).

How do you calm your fretful heart?  “I know nothing more effec­tive for quieting a Christian soul and getting contentment than this, setting your heart to work in the duties of the immediate circum­stances that you are now in, and taking heed of your thoughts about other conditions as a mere temptation.”  Say to yourself:  “Well, though I am in a low position, yet I am serving the counsels of God in those circumstances where I am; it is the counsel of God that has brought me into these circumstances that I am in, and I desire to serve the counsel of God in these circumstances” (p. 52). 

Burroughs also says it more briefly:  “He has all things who has him that has all things” (p. 68).  “Many think, O if I had what another man has, how happily and comfortably should I live!  But if you are a Christian, whatever your condition, you have enough within yourself” (p. 78).  When “if only” beckons, sin is lurking very close by—beware!

“My brethren, the reason why you have not got contentment in the things of the world is not because you have not got enough of them—that is not the reason—but the reason is, because they are not proportionable to that immortal soul of yours that is capable of God himself”(p. 91).  That’s a 17th century way to say:  this world’s trinkets will never satisfy your heart’s deep longings.  There’s a God-shaped void in your soul and nothing can fill it but the all-satisfying and eternally magnificent Lord of glory himself (Gen. 1:27; Eccl. 3:11).

Burroughs sees this life as a voyage, and at Christmas this is vital:  “When you are at sea, though you have not as many things as you have at home, you are not troubled at it:  you are contented.  Why?  Because you are at sea” (p. 94).  “Thus it should be with us in this world, for the truth is, we are all in this world but as seafaring men, tossed up and down on the waves of the sea of this world, and our haven is Heaven; here we are travelling, and our home is a distant home in another world” (p. 95).

Wealth burdens the traveler four ways:  1) trouble (in one’s family and one’s dealings with others); 2) danger (“the sweet of prosperity invites the Devil and temptation”); 3) duty (of those given much God requires much); and 4) account (we’re all stewards, and those with great wealth have a great account to give to God) (pp. 103-107).

We must know three things about “God’s ways”:  1) “God’s ordinary course is that his people in this world should be in an afflicted condi­tion” (p. 115).  2) “Usually when God intends the greatest mercy to any of his people he brings them into the lowest condition” (p. 116).  3) “It is the way of God to work by contraries, to turn the greatest evil into the greatest good” (p. 117). 

And thus, “There is no work which God has made—the sun, moon, stars and all the world—in which so much of the glory of God appears as in a man who lives quietly in the midst of adversity” (pp. 122-23).  Does the glory of God shine in your life this Christmas?

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