Christmas may be over but for us as believers, we should never stop reflecting on the meaning of Christ’s birth, daily.  As you focus on Christ’s birth during the Christmas season and throughout the many seasons of your life, I want to encourage you to not overlook the manger scene.   It wasn’t all calm and not all was bright.  No it wasn’t such a silent night full of peace like our nativity sets like to picture it.  Rather it was a hard difficult journey for a couple of teenagers who were tired, overwhelmed, finding themselves in a smelly, dark, cold cave filled with animals and surrounded by foul-smelling strange shepherds from the hills disrupting their privacy.  Imagine a nativity scene of confusion, chaos, difficulty, uncertainty and then stop and look.  Do you see it?  Right in the middle of it all, is that manger.  That lowly manger which contained in it the Savior of the world.  Now think about your life.  Do you ever feel at times like life’s journey has led you to being stuck in a dark cave filled with the stink of life’s stress?  Maybe the future is unclear and doubts and fears have begun to disrupt your silent night.  I want to encourage you, to take a look around you.  In the midst of your situation, that is where you can still find Him.  Just like that lowly manger, thousands of years ago, He still resides in the midst of our here and now.  Mary was able to cherish all these things in her heart.  She knew and so did Joseph that the prophecy was fulfilled.  God was with them.  So the next time you happen to come across another nativity set, don’t just ignore it.  Stop and focus on the manger, let it be a voice that speaks forth tidings of great joy and let it serve as a constant reminder that in the midst of our messiness and difficulties, there is one who is still with us in the middle of it all because He chooses to be.  Jesus, our Immanuel, “God is with us”.

Isaiah 7:14

“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign.  Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”  

Hope, we are all searching for it.  As believers in Christ, we are all believing for it someday in the future, “the sweet by and by”.  If our circumstances need changing, we hope that God can do a miracle to make it better.  When He doesn’t, there goes our hope.  I heard a terrific sermon the other day by my pastor on this very topic and he used the illustration of the movie the Matrix to drive home his point about where we can find our real hope.  Remember the movie the Matrix?  It came out twenty something years ago.  A movie about a guy who is a computer programmer by day, “Mr. Anderson” and a computer hacker by night, “Neo.”  One day these so called special agents who are the bad guys come visit Mr. Anderson at his office and give him a threatening warning that the hacking he is doing is wrong and he needs to stop messing with the system.  Throughout the movie though, Mr. Anderson doesn’t stop and instead of conforming to the agent’s demands and just going through life as Mr. Anderson, he begins to fight back the system and embrace his real destiny, the one as Neo computer hacker. My pastor brought up the scene where the bad special agent dude has Mr. Anderson by the neck in a speeding subway train.  All is lost as the agent calls out his name several times, “Mr. Anderson!”  Caught in the death grip of the special agent and barely surviving, Mr. Anderson looks up at the agent and with everything he has left, he cries out, “My name is Neo!”  And just like that he becomes almost superhuman, freeing himself from his enemies grip, and bursting through the roof of the train, victorious.  You see where my pastor was going with this?  Sometimes we as believers in Christ, get caught up in the grip of Satan as he tries to remind us of his lies, as he tries to accuse us, condemn us, tell us there is no hope, identify us by our past sins, addictions and failures.  Yet when we look to the promises of God’s word and renew our minds in who He says we are in Christ, we will be able to free ourselves from the grip of Satan’s lies.  When circumstances are holding us down, we will be able to rise above it all because we know that real hope isn’t found in our circumstances getting better, or even changing for the good.  Our hope is found today in who we are in Christ and the trials and suffering that we think are there to hurt us, will only aid us in doing the very thing Satan doesn’t want us to know; the truth that trials transform our identity into becoming more like Christ.  When we can learn to embrace this truth, we will be able to endure the grip of anything that Satan and the hardships of this life want to strangle us with.  So the next time you find yourself faced under the death grip of Satan’s stronghold, just tell him your real name,  “My name is Child of God!” Then go and live differently in hope and in the freedom your new identity.     

2 Corinthians 5:17 

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 

Romans 5:3-5

Not only that but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.”