The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas (14 page)

She who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
She who repents most makes the most progress —you always go farther when traveling light. She who repents of seemingly little sins knows that all sins are great —and knows a greater God. Repentance is as much air to a Christ-follower as faith.

Nearly eight hundred years after Jonah, another Man boards a boat and sleeps through a great storm. He awakens to anxious boat mates. He calms the storm —not by owning His complicity but by taking on ours. He assures,
“One greater than Jonah is here” (Matthew 14:21). Because He doesn’t calm one storm but all storms. He casts Himself into our waves, into our storms, into our depths; He sacrifices Himself for our saving; and He is binding the broken and raising the dead and re-membering you. Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, but Jesus took three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, in the belly of death,
so no one else would ever have to
.

He did not abandon you in the ultimate storm of your soul. He will not abandon you in the immediate storm of your now.

He asks you, calls you, begs you to believe. Will you believe the wild miracle of a storm and a resurrection from the belly of a fish? Will you believe the wilder miracle of the Word made flesh, God with skin, God in a trough, God on a Cross? Will you believe in your own resurrection from the belly of sin? Will you believe in miracles? You can whisper that word
repentance
 —and find yourself resurrecting. Turning around and resurrecting.

There’s snow falling heavy over a cabin tucked under pine trees right now. Storms could get worse in the north today. Or closer.

Advent never stops coming for you.

Turn around and watch it come. Just slow and turn around.

Write down one thing you repent of today. Draw a heart around it. Tuck it under the Jesse Tree as your gift to Jesus of a contrite heart, and pray that Jesus would help you give up this sin.

[Advent] is a time of quiet anticipation. If Christ is going to come again into our hearts, there must be repentance. Without repentance, our hearts will be so full of worldly things that there will be “no room in the inn” for Christ to be born again. . . . We have the joy not of celebration, which is the joy of Christmas, but the joy of anticipation.

JOHN R. BROKHOFF

When have you found yourself running from God? How did He draw you back to Himself?

In what ways have you seen God calm the storms in your life?

Thank God that He invites you to turn around, to be resurrected.

You, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, are only a small village.

MICAH 5:2

     You, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,

          are only a small village among all the people of Judah.

     Yet a ruler of Israel,

          whose origins are from the distant past,

          will come from you on my behalf.

     The people of Israel will be abandoned to their enemies

          until the woman in labor gives birth.

     Then at last his fellow countrymen

          will return from exile to their own land.

     And he will stand to lead his flock with the LORD’s strength,

          in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.

     Then his people will live there undisturbed,

          for he will be highly honored around the world.

          And he will be the source of peace.

MICAH 5:2-5

O little town of Bethlehem Ephrathah and Scappoose, Oregon, and Wallagrass, Maine, and Americus, Kansas, and the quiet side streets and living rooms of a million small and unlikely places —Kingdom comes to places like you.

You, there, with your lights strung up and down like sequins that have seen better days. With your ragamuffin kids and paint-chipped Christmas ornaments from 1982, your scarlet poinsettias in the front window, in the fading light of the front room.

There’s a winter wonderland set up on someone’s mantel. They’ll get carolers to come round to the nursing home this Friday night and sing, “Hark! the herald angels sing / Glory to the newborn King.” Everyone will smile worn and grateful, and no one will care if it’s off key.

Because there is a king in Bethlehem. In backwater Bethlehem, an unmarried hardly-woman in labor giving birth to your King, and He will be your newborn and ancient and coming and future King, newly birthed, whose goings-forth have been from of old, from ancient days. A King like and infinitely greater than King Arthur, with his tomb inscription:
“Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus”
 —“Here lies Arthur, king once, and king to be.” Forsake the fairy tales for the story that is history:
this
Bethlehem King is the true and the real once and still coming King —the King of humanity’s memory. The King from the beginning, back when we were young and the world was Edenic and the wonderland was us.

There’s your winter wonderland set up on the cosmic stage: the Son is sent in through the fallen kingdom’s back door, the King is born into a barn to wrest the forces from the pit, slay the demons, crush the head of the evil one, and woo the world back to life. The war is bloody. It is heinously dark. And on Calvary, evil corners the Son. Iron spikes the King to a Tree and laughs haunting triumph —only to have light shatter the dark and the King fling off the rotting grave clothes and rise.

Author J. R. R. Tolkien called this moment when the light of deliverance throws back the darkness the “eucatastrophe” —the moment when evil is dashed and righteousness suddenly, spectacularly rises.

“The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history,” writes Tolkien. The birth of the King is the light in your story, in history, that slashes back the smothering dark. The birth of Christ is, for the band of survivors, the saved hushed there in the manger of Bethlehem, the moment of eucatastrophe, of joy —that “catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart.” In that eucatastrophe instant, under
a Bethlehem star when humanity witnesses the King-God inhale earth air into His lungs, you can feel it: “joy beyond the walls of the world.”
[23]

Because the King beyond this world has entered this world, and the wonderland in Him we always hoped for is here and now and true.

The unexpected Bethlehem King is the once and coming King, the King of the first and still coming second Advent, the King coming again to rule the earth and make all the sad things untrue.
[24]
The wonderland is unfolding even now, Kingdom coming, because His Word “will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:11-12, NIV).

The dance of the sugarplum fairies just withered a bit.

The very trees of the fields are going to dance and clap their hands. The King is coming, and the new Kingdom is stirring. And stirring in you. When the King rules your world, you cease to rule or worry. All worry dethrones God. All worrying makes you King and God incompetent.

There is a King born in Bethlehem and on the throne. You can breathe.

There are Christmas trees blinking in living rooms tonight in Americus, Kansas, and Quitman, Arkansas, and Mud Lake, Idaho.

Someone plays it on a piano that needs tuned: “Glorrrry to the newborn King.”

And in small towns and in the little town of Bethlehem, the lights on all the trees dance.

For the coming King, the trees of the field all dance.