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“God has placed Himself squarely within the confines of my confines so that within my reach there lays the very thing that I need to break me out of those confines. Therefore, if I remain confined, it may be because I don’t understand that I’m confined. And if I don’t understand that I’m confined, I can be certain that I don’t understand my need for God. And that is likely the greatest confinement of all.”

“My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God’s love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me.”

“The sun is but a mere handful of minutes from rising on yet another Christmas morning. And I sit here in the early morning light wrestling with a handful of inordinately stubborn words that refuse to submit to any kind of syntax that might express the richness of my thoughts on this morning. But then I realized that the God of Christmas is infinitely too big for words, and His gift surpasses any syntax man could hope to form to explain it. Therefore, my prayer for you is that the God of Christmas will come to you in a manner beyond words and change your life beyond imagination.”

“One of the things that vexes me to the point of near insanity is understanding the message of Christmas and realizing the potency of this message to transform the worst of our lives so that we can become the best of our ourselves, to shift the momentum of entire cultures so that the world is brilliantly enriched by each instead of destroyed by all, and to handily touch the hem of history itself so that history is changed in the touching. And while all of these are ours for the taking, I continue to watch the mindless hoards trudge past these things in order to embrace everything that is not the ‘everything’ of these gifts. And so I pray that God would grant them a heart ready to be captured by the ‘everything’ of Christmas.”

“Sometimes what is said to be a gift may appear more of a curse only because the greatest gifts of all are the gifts that have enough disruptive force to break us out of everything that’s breaking us. And God loves us far too much not to give us exactly those kinds of gifts.”

“Fear tells me that while there might be a host of people who wish to stand beside me in times of crisis, the tangled wreckage is sometimes so enormous that the best of their efforts leave them stranded at a great distance. And standing desperately alone surveying the carnage that holds all others a bay, God suddenly taps me on the shoulder, leans over and whispers, 'how about a little demolition?”

“It is early Christmas morning. As I write, the sun has yet to rise. The world remains drowsy, only now beginning the process of shaking itself awake. But as the world rises from its slumber, will it awaken? Will it come to understand the utter immensity of this day? That in a single yet brilliant moment in time, God inserted the whole of Himself into time and effortlessly broke the back of history in that single act? Will we begin to comprehend the fact that in that singular act, God altered the entire trajectory of time itself, thereby sending the future careening toward hope instead of descending into darkness? And are we able to even remotely fathom what the world would have been like had time not been altered in this exact manner? On any morning, will we awaken to all of that, or will we do nothing more than arise from slumber but never find ourselves awakened in the arising?”

“When Christmas has passed, if I find that I am none the better for having engaged it, the only explanation that I can muster up is that I can be handed the greatest of gifts, yet still have the emptiest of hands. And finding myself in that dreadful condition, I am left to assume that the fool within me has chosen to live with the hands that now define me instead of embracing the God Who wishes to fill me.”

“Are we so gleefully enraptured with our own greed that we think it wise to banish God to the barest fringes of our existence? For I would surmise that if we are that impoverished, we deserve the destruction that such impoverishment will rain upon us. And in the rain, I must tell you that I will not flee to the fringes to which we have banished God in order to find shelter in His embrace. Rather, I will pray Him into the middle of the rain so that all of us will suddenly find ourselves sheltered from the rain that we had created by the God that we had banished. For such is the character of this God.”

“Are we brave enough to realize that we are entirely unable to achieve and subsequently sustain that for which we passionately dream? And are we sufficiently humble to acknowledge those limitations so that God might have space to expand our dreams leagues beyond the scope of our imagination while concurrently sustaining them in the expanding? For these things are the essential hallmarks of the great nation which we persistently and vigorously aspire to be.”

“Anytime that man creates a belief system that is designed to elevate something to a position higher than himself his natural tendency is to assume occupancy of that position under the guise of that which was originally intended to be in that position. And if religion has any chance of keeping us from assuming occupancy of a position that we have no business occupying, our faith must be aggressively cultivated in a manner that nothing else is. Otherwise, we will be the gods of our own demise with the culture that we were sent to save following right behind us.”