Zechariah 8:1-23, Revelation 16:1-21, Psalm 144:1-15, Proverbs 30:29-31
Today is the 25th day of December, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible, I am Brian. It is a joy and an honor to be here with you, it’s the 25th of December and so it’s hard to hide the fact that this is Christmas day. Merry Christmas everybody. We have journeyed all year all the way back to Christmas day again, O and what enjoy it is to be here around the Global Campfire, just to have a few minutes around the Global Campfire with you today and it’s a joy to be with my family as I’m sure it is for you as well. This is a day that we get to…to appreciate that the longing for a Savior is over, a savior has come.
Song - Joy to the World by Crowder
So, on this Christmas day and every day for that matter, we come together to take the next step forward as we continue our journey through the Scriptures and our next step forward leads us back into the book of Zechariah. Today we will read Zechariah chapter 8.
Commentary:
Okay, so obviously it’s no secret that it’s Christmas day and I love…I love the season, it brings me so much joy, I so deeply enjoy it. This year we had two new babies born into our family. Reagan, China and Ben’s daughter and Eden which is Kristin and Jocelyn’s daughter. So, I’m overjoyed. And their gonna be dressed up so cute and I love, I love Christmas. I love the music of Christmas. I love the spirit of Christmas and I’m sure you do to. You get together with family maybe we only see once a year or not that often, and with all the things that have been going on last couple years, maybe we haven’t seen certain people for quite a long time, that we get to see again today and that’s a beautiful thing and we’ll feast together and celebrate the coming of the Savior and exchange gifts and maybe have a fire in the fireplace and everything is decorated pretty. We actually do a pretty good job around the world of festivity in celebration all centered around the arrival of the Savior and I…I love it very much. I also know that that’s not necessarily everyone’s story, that may be the majority of our stories, but we may be at the Christmas table this year missing someone who is no longer with us, or we may be all alone with no one to share the joy with. For some, Christmas day really isn’t the day of…of warm hearts and burning fireplaces. It’s a day of loneliness or a day where the…the best thoughts of Christmas are Christmas’s past when we were little or the kids were little, or whatever. I just want to acknowledge that; it is joy to the world the Lord has come but circumstances of our lives over the last year may have done everything possible to steal that joy away and I understand. It’s easier, it’s more festive, it’s more heartwarming to talk about a baby in a manger, angels singing the shepherds, wisemen traveling and a deep sense of hope and I feel all those things but I also feel underneath it all no matter what Christmas I come to, I mean, it pretty much, we get to this point in the year and I’m looking at another week and we finish a journey and that starts, it doesn’t bring me down, it just starts to make me feel melancholy inside, we’re nearing the end of another year. I look back over the year at all that’s happened some good, some challenging right. That’s the nature of any life in a year and because of my temperament and my makeup, I, as a creative person I can get melancholy like, that’s really where creativity ends up coming from a lot. So, today is indifferent and every Christmas kind of brings out because there’s so much festivity and joy and that’s so wonderful but there are also people who fall through the cracks of that and I’m not really one of those who falls through the cracks and I’m lonely and depressed and I don’t have anybody, that’s not my story. I do have a family, but there is something underneath all of the joy, it’s not depression. I’ve wondered about it for many many years because I’ve recognized it in myself. Actually, completely kept it to myself for…for most of my life and really only began to talk about it during the season of The Daily Audio Bible. I used to think there was something wrong with me, why can’t I experience this kind of joy. Why is there something underneath it all, that feels not joyful and I used to think it was just my temperament or maybe a little bit the touch of the Christmas blues right, just like a little mild depression or something like that. But over the years reading through Revelation, reading through this portion of Revelation on Christmas day, I realized man that there’s this doesn’t feel like this reading doesn’t feel like Christmas, it doesn’t feel merry and happy, angels are pouring out bowls of God’s wrath upon the earth. The things that happen on earth are monumental. Several years ago, though I realized wait, wait, wait, this isn't…this isn’t the Christmas tree, Christmas presents, feasting kind of story but this is no less important because what we’re watching in Revelation right now is that baby Jesus, lying in a manger, all grown up as the King of Kings and the King of Kings is eradicating and destroying evil, just annihilating evil, moving the world toward shalom; the way things are supposed to be. And that’s when we’ll begin to realize that things aren’t as they are supposed to be and we know it. And then the hope of Christmas becomes the hope of the world, the hope that there could be change, the hope that all things will be made new again. So, I’ve realized over time, yeah this isn’t the Christmas blues, if I really want to think about what I’m feeling, if and it’s hard sometimes when you’re trying to like specifically describe an emotion, but I began to realize I’m a very busy person, so running all the time but this feeling, this blues if that’s what you want to call it, this sort of sense underneath it all, that somethings not exactly right. I finally realized I think…I think that’s longing and it was actually beginning to observe and appreciate the Advent season, which is about longing, but I began to realize yeah…yeah, underneath it all we can run we can have wonderful, joyous moments, but underneath it all, we are longing with the rest of creation for all things to be made new again. And sometimes when we slowdown and we sort of change the scenery and were festive and happy, like on Christmas, like this kind of a holiday and we’ve kind of changed our rhythm and so we’re more still, we can begin to feel it. And it can be experienced in all kinds of ways but I just want to suggest that maybe you’re feeling lonely because you are lonely but probably a part of it in all of us is that underneath it all, we are groaning for things to be as they were intended. We are longing, we are longing for this grown-up Jesus that we’re reading about in Revelation, we are longing for all things to be restored and made new again. So, I just want to say maybe…maybe that’s not you, maybe you don’t even know what I’m talking about and that’s fine, but for those of you that do, don’t just stuff it because what we begin to realize is it’s like the rest of life. It’s bitter and it’s sweet. We are longing for something that we know is coming. The restoration of all things but we are here now and we can still experience joy in fullness and hope and Christmas was the beginning of the story. And in Revelation we’re reading more the conclusion of the story and we are in the middle of all of it and it matters that we learn to endure and it matters that we get it through our skulls that we are the body of Christ; the physical hands and feet of Jesus in this world and we are here to do the work of Christ as we become Christ like in this world, we are not passively observing the story we are active participants in the story. So, let’s embrace all of it because it’s all part of it, it’s joy to the world the Lord has come and the longing for him to come back. It’s all part of it and so I’m going to go now and embrace all of it.
Prayer:
Father, we thank You for Christmas, we thank You for coming, we thank You for a humbling Yourself and leaving perfection and entering the fray with us very imperfect people in a very imperfect place and You have given us hope that things can be restored, even things in us, they can be restored. You are making all things new. And so, we rejoice in that hope on this Christmas Day. We pray that Your Holy Spirit would hover in our homes, would hover around our tables, would hover in all of the discussions and conversations that we will have, would be involved in all of the festivities and that we wouldn’t get sidetracked, that we would stay near to the awareness that You are present with us, even if…even if we’re eating Christmas dinner alone, You are present with us. So, come Holy Spirit, we pray, in the mighty name of Jesus we ask. Amen.