ALL WE NEED FOR CHRISTMAS

ALL WE NEED FOR CHRISTMAS

We have just come through Black Friday, often a day of retail madness and debt enslavement. (Actually this year it became Gray Thursday as the aspirations of Black Friday leaked forward into our Thanksgiving celebrations.)  The basic consumerism of our age rears its ugly head and launches us into Advent thinking of the flesh instead of the spirit.

If we are not careful, the Spirit of God goes almost unnoticed except for Sunday morning worship (unless of course we are skipping worship to do some family Christmas activity, or to snatch some overtime wages).

Rewind the tape to the beginning of the first century.  Let your Google satellite map zero in on the nation of Israel, now called Palestine or “the land of the Jews.”  It is an occupied nation seething with political rebellion. It is a poor land and its people poor from subsistence farms, greedy religious leaders, and ruinous Roman taxation.  It is a nation of wounded pride and frustrated hope where people struggle to keep favor with a God who has been silent for a long time.

It is a place where people live in deep darkness trying to navigate their way through the valley of the shadow of death.

Long before the birth of Christ, a prophet named Isaiah spoke the words we now find in Isaiah 9.1-7.
1. Read verse 2. What is the key word here?
2. What do you believe is the promise contained in “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light”?
3. What does the metaphor of a light appearing at dawn add to that promise?
4.  Where is the area of darkness or spiritual night that you struggle with?
5.  Ask God to bring light into those places for you.
6. Pray that God will bring light for you this Christmas.

(C) 2013 by Stephen L Dunn