Do you need direction, light, and the truth? He is the Wonderful Counselor. Do you need a mighty champion to defeat the enemies of sin and death? He is Mighty God. Do you need permanent fatherly affection and protection? He is Everlasting Father. Do you need to be reconciled to God and your neighbor to enjoy peace and prosperity? He is Prince of Peace. Jesus the Mighty Savior will defeat all of our enemies: the world, the flesh, the devil, and death itself—enemies that we ourselves are helpless to defeat. He wins our salvation and safeguards our salvation. 

Cut flowers. I have mixed feelings about this.
Yes, I love it when the fairer sex in our home carry in bunches of bulbs, roses, lavender, and hydrangeas from the garden. They brighten and cheer us all, but I think we all feel a bit sad when we cut flowers. We know that we have cut them off from their life source. We stand them in vases of water, but this can only slow the process of death and corruption. The flowers droop, the petals fall, the vibrant colors fade to brown, and then the whole bunch is crammed into the curbside bin with the other rubbish.
Christmas. Exchanging lavish gifts. Putting up a pine in the living room and decorating it to the tunes of Bing Crosby. Drawing together the family. Eating festive foods like ham on the bone, fruitcake, and rum balls. Why do people do this? “Because we have always done it, going back generations.” Yes, but what made our forebears do all this in the first place? What made them celebrate? It was of course the birth of Christ. Christmas was a general celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago.
Like cut flowers, Christmas is drooping because we have cut it off from the source.
But Christmas is drooping. We still do the good old things, but the petals are falling and the colors are fading. We can see a future when it will be tossed out altogether. Why? Because we have cut Christmas off from the source.
Let’s get back to the source. Let’s go back to the things that made us celebrate in the first place. We can’t reconnect cut flowers to the plant, but we can all reconnect to the Christmas history. It’s important to do this. Not to save Christmas—although that may come to be a delightful side effect—but ourselves. To be saved from meaninglessness, our sins, death, fear, and estrangement from God.
Isaiah 9:2-6: God Will Send a Child
In 740 BC the nation of Judah was frightened. To the north, the brutal Assyrian Empire was growing rapidly in power, and it seemed only a matter of time before they would descend to ravage Judah’s villages and homes. Then God told them not to fear because he was going to send them a child:

The people walking in darknesshave seen a great light;on those living in the land of deep darknessa light has dawned.You have enlarged the nationand increased their joy;they rejoice before youas people rejoice at the harvest….For to us a child is born,to us a son is given,and the government will be on his shoulders.And he will be calledWonderful Counselor, Mighty God,Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isa. 9:2-3, 6;all Scripture quotes from NIV)

“The government will be upon his shoulders.” And this great prophecy was fulfilled with the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem (Luke 1:31-33). He will carry the world in the direction he wants to carry it. He will rule—the future is on his shoulders. God’s people don’t have to live with fear and uncertainty.
The character of a ruler is of the greatest importance.
But what is the character of this Savior? God said through Isaiah to not be afraid because he will rule; but, what kind of ruler would he be?
The fact is, the kings of the day were never good men. Israel’s first king, Saul, was fearful and impatient; he disregarded God’s laws and turned to necromancy. David was Israel’s archetypal “good king,” yet even he succumbed to adultery and a murderous cover-up. Solomon succumbed to the idols of his gargantuan harem. Rehoboam was a hot-headed fool. And so on. There were very few useful kings in Judah, and all of them were flawed.
So we can understand if Judah heard Isaiah’s words cynically: A great king? Universal rule on his shoulders? Yes, but will he be good?
We too know all about bad leaders. Kaiser Wilhelm led the world into the sickening First World War. Mussolini led Italy into fascism and inspired Spain’s Franco and Germany’s Hitler to do the same. The Japanese warlords ravaged Southeast Asia. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao butchered their people. Petty leaders like Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Ratko Mladic were genocidal maniacs. Then there are arch-terrorists like Osama bin Laden and nuclear gangsters like Kim Jong-un.
Even the “good” leaders are fatally flawed.
The British and French general staffs of World War I were homicidally reckless with the millions of young lives under their command. The British Parliament’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s paved the way to the great slaughter of World War II. Roosevelt was manipulated by Stalin.
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Practice gratitude. Thankfulness is a central part of the Christian life. But as we think about apathy and triviality, I want to highlight the subversive nature of gratitude. Paul writes in Ephesians 5:3–4: “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.” Notice that thanksgiving undermines filthy, empty, trivial, and mocking talk. We replace triviality with gratitude to God. Calling out all the good things we have from God immediately gives perspective to our daily lives. 

A High Calling
As a young man, Jonathan Edwards, the 18th Century preacher and theologian, wrote seventy personal resolutions to help keep his spiritual life focused, energetic, and God-centered. His third resolution reads, “Resolved, if ever I shall fall and grow dull, so as to neglect to keep any part of these Resolutions, to repent of all I can remember, when I come to myself again.” A later resolution echoes that sentiment: “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.”1 As a pastor who regularly taught the word of God, scaling the heights of doctrines like God’s sovereignty, heaven and hell, justification by faith, and more, he was well aware that the heart—even more than the intellect—is always the issue. He knew that those exposed to the deepest and richest Christian truths will often find themselves unresponsive to those very truths. So, he resolved that whenever he fell prey to such dullness and indifference, that he would do whatever he could to break free.
All Christians, not just Edwards, are called to live zealous lives. Paul writes, “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord” (Rom. 12:11). He instructs Christians to maintain a spiritual intensity in their lives. We are to be energetically engaged in the things of God. This is a high calling, even if it is a really difficult one.
The Paradox of Apathy
Most, if not all, Christians go through periods when their passion for God wanes. But there are some of us who experience extended stretches of time when we just don’t care to engage with our faith. Nothing motivates us to pray; nothing excites us about Christ. We just feel blah and stuck. We feel apathetic.

Yet, what’s interesting about our apathy is that it only seems to take aim at meaningful things, spiritual things, things that are meant to give us life. Apathy is highly selective. In fact, one clinical expert on apathy defines typical forms of apathy as “selective apathy.”2 This term describes how relatively healthy people can dramatically lose interest in some things but not all things. And herein lies the disturbing paradox of apathy for Christians. Those of us struggling with apathy can often find ourselves able to get excited about trivial or less meaningful things. Sports or news or the latest must-see Netflix series are still able to get us moving.

The paradox of apathy is that, for the spiritually apathetic, there is an inverse relationship between the greatness of a truth and our emotional and practical response to it. The grander the truth, the less we care about it. I imagine there are a number of reasons for this, including the basic law that familiarity breeds contempt. And it’s true, many Christians are (rightly) very, very familiar with astronomically important truths. Yet, whatever the reason may be, we are bored by big things: the bigger, the more boring. We are, ironically, numbed by grandeur.
Numbed by Triviality
Cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “The public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.”3 What he puts his finger on is that our apathy can sometimes derive not just from meaningful things becoming too familiar, but from being inundated by trivial things. All day long, news media or social media is vying for our attention. They foist upon us trivial thing after trivial thing—reality star break ups, a former president saying this or that, awards show snubs, and athletes tweeting whatever—and call us to treat them like they’re monumental events.
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The groaning creation will then be set free into the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:21). Its resurrection will follow ours, just as its fall followed ours. No more hints, previews and echoes on that day. But face to face, unveiled glory.

I love our local bazaar in the fall. A gentle and steady wind blows down from the mountains, stirring the tree branches and their yellowing leaves. The summer heat has passed, and the buildings, the people, and earth itself seem to sigh contentedly in the cooler weather. Some trees and plants even celebrate the lower temps with a second, mini Spring. Pomegranates are ripe, piled high on carts, red and crunchy. Olives are ripening also. The autumn sun, lower and playfully angled to the south, shines through the swaying branches. Street musicians play classic melodies on stringed instruments and traditional flutes.
Every believer likely has certain places where they feel eternity bleeding through into the present. Places where the beauty of this world awaken some kind of deep memory – or prophecy – of another world. Eden that was lost, or Eden to be remade. These longings, as Lewis pointed out, can be sweeter than the deepest pleasures realized in this life. As penned by The Gray Havens, we “can’t find something better than this ache.”
I wonder what kinds of scenes awaken this inner longing for eternity in other believers. Is it something we all experience?
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