Christian Reflection and Prayer

"Just as you can hear the wind but can't tell
where it comes from or where it is going, so
you can't explain how people are born of the Spirit."
John 3:8 NLT

Reflection:

Who died on November 22, 1963?
Most people would say, "President John F. Kennedy."
Do you remember where you were when President
Kennedy died.  I do.
But another great man died that day, a man that
I so much admire.  His name was C. S. Lewis.

His initials stood for Clive Staples, but to his friends
he was known as "Jack." Born near Belfast, Ireland,
in 1898, he was raised as an Anglican. But at the
age of ten his world was shaken when his mother
died of cancer. Jack wanted nothing to do with a
God so cruel as to take his mother. By his early
teenage years he had become an atheist.

Jack's spiritual pilgrimage back to God began in
1926 with a conversation with a cynical friend
whose belief in the Trinity challenged Lewis'
atheistic presuppositions.

Through the influence of various philosophers
he read and conversations with his intellectual
colleagues, including J. R. R. Tolkien, he began
to realize that an absolute Spirit or God existed
and that the events of the Bible had really happened.

By 1931, he had passed from merely believing in
God to trusting in him as his Savior.

In 1941, Lewis burst on the literary scene with
The Screwtape Letters. Books then began to flow
from his pen at an amazing rate.

C. S. Lewis is considered the most influential
Christian author of the twentieth century — quite a
leap from the atheism of his youth.

adapted from the The One Year® Book of Christian
History by E. Michael and Sharon Rusten (Tyndale)
pp 654-55

Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalms 122:1-9;
Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44

"So stay awake..."     (Mt. 24:42). 

There once was a small iron-working town
where the mills were kept running day and
night. The great steam-hammers, some of
them weighing several tons, were night and
day beating out huge masses of molten metal.
All night long the sound reverberated through
the streets of the village. But the townspeople
were  so accustomed to the noise that they
could sleep soundly, despite the near deafening
noise. One night, the machinery broke down
and the hammers suddenly stopped working,
and nearly everyone in town immediately woke.
They had been awakened, unexpectedly, by
the silence.

"So stay awake... The Son of Man is coming
at an hour you do not expect," Jesus says in
today's Gospel Lesson (Mt. 24:42,44).

When would you least expect Him to come?
Could it be that you are so buried in the past,
dreaming about the way things were, or so
wedded to the future, dreaming about the way
things are going to be, that now is the time you
would least expect Him to come? But today is
the day the Lord has made. Today is the day
to be glad and rejoice in. Today is the day to
shut down the noise in your anxious hearts
and allow the blessed silence to awaken you
to the Lord's presence in your life.

Some of us may be bone tired here today.
Some of us may be ready to go to sleep.
But here is Jesus saying to us in today's Lesson,
"So stay awake! .... stand ready because the
Son of man is coming at an hour you do not
expect" (Mt. 24:42,44). This is the Message
of the Advent season. We are being called to
attention! We are being called to open our eyes
to what is going on in our Christian lives. We
are being called to a new awareness of the
reason for our Advent celebration.

We celebrate, first of all, what God our Creator
did more than two thousand years ago when he
changed the course of history by sending His
own Christ Presence -- the innermost essence
of His Loving Being into our world in the form of
a tiny Babe. Part of what this season is about
is the celebration of that Event. Already,
everywhere we look, we see the Christmas
cribs and lights and stars and candles and
other symbols of the birth of Jesus. And we
can rejoice in them. But Advent is also a
celebration of what God our Creator is doing now.
For of what avail is all this celebration if Christ
is not born in our lives now -- if we do not
prepare to receive Him in the Advent spirit of the
Gospels: the spirit of repentance?

Scripture:

“I am the light of the world. Whoever
follows me will never walk in darkness,
but will have the light of life.”
(John 8: 12)

There was an extremely old man, with a
number of health problems, to put it mildly.
He suffered from crippling arthritis. He was
losing his hearing. He needed surgery for
cataracts. He couldn't remember things.
He had high blood pressure. Disgustedly,
he said to his doctor, "I don't know why
God keeps me alive!" The doctor replied,
"I'm sure it is because He has something
in mind that He wants you to do." The old
man thought for a minute, then leaning his
full 97 pounds into the doctor and poking
his chest with a bony finger, he stamped
his foot and snapped, "Well, I'm not going
to do it!" Trouble and sorrow come into your
life. You feel defeated, abandoned, depressed.
Then someone says to you, "You ought to thank
God." "Well, I'm not going to do it, I don't feel
like it," you reply. Of course you don't feel like it.

Reflection:

How many times in your life have you had
something really bad happen to you.  You
feel angry, unforgiving, depressed,
certainly not happy.
Let me ask you something, at that specific
time in your life do you want to thank God?
How in the world can you thank God in such
troubled times. 

What we must realize, that is the exact point
and time we need to thank and praise God.
When it is the hardest for us, when it is the
costliest for us, that is when the spirit of
praise and thanksgiving can bring us into the
closest possible relationship with our Almighty
and Loving God.

His Son supplied us with the example=
Jesus' neighbors once chased Him out of town
and tried to throw Him off a high cliff. Jesus'
closest friends betrayed Him and deserted Him
in time of trouble. Jesus' body-sweat became
blood when He reflected on the sins of the world.
Jesus' compassion for the world propelled His
broken body up Calvary's Hill where He was
executed by order of His own people-and through
it all, JESUS NEVER, I REPEAT NEVER, CEASED
PRAISING AND THANKING GOD.
Jesus was the "Sacrifice of Thanksgiving" because
He knew that the Father would not abandon the
world. He knew that after the darkness there would
be light; after defeat, victory; after sorrow, joy;
after death, Resurrection.

THIS THANKSGIVING REMEMBER TO PRAISE
AND THANK GOD FOR ALL THE WONDROUS
THINGS HE HAS DONE!

Prayer of Thanksgiving and Praise:

(from Martin Rinckart's great hymn)

Now thank we all our God
With hearts and hand and voices
Who wondrous things hath done
In Whom the world rejoices
Who from our mothers' arms
Has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love
And still is ours today.
AMEN!

BLESSED THANKSGIVING TO YOU ALL!