May the Lord be with you and bless you on this Christmas Eve.

Know the Ideal Church. Commit to a Real Church.
Here are some practical steps for applying the doctrine of the church to real life.
A Real Christmas
“As a mother, I wanted to shield my children from the harder parts of the Christmas story in order to create memories untainted by ugly truths. So we focused on singing angels, wondering shepherds and a miraculous star. The familiar story reminds us all that one day goodness and beauty broke into history to show us the way home.”
The Good News Story
The Gospel is the air we breathe and need to breathe again and again. Whether you are just starting your journey of faith or have been traveling the road for years, discover how it all ties together in The Good News Story. Explore the Bible cover-to-cover to behold the grace, wonder, beauty, goodness, joy, and love of God in the person and work of Jesus! Watch and download this multi-video series and illustrated study guide for free at thegoodnewsstory.com. (Sponsored Link)
The 2021 Word of the Year – “Allyship”
“Dictionary.com has an annual tradition of naming a ‘word of the year,’ and this year’s winner is the term allyship.” Denny Burk explains why this is significant.
Stop Being Fearful; Start Being Joyful
“In the midst of the busyness of this season, it’s hard to find time to consider Christ. Isn’t it? Probably most of us have thought at one time or another that this time of year is so busy that we almost dread it. We’ve taken this special time of the year when we could consider Christ and we’ve made it so busy, so crazy, so frantic, that we don’t consider Him.”
There Will Be No Burden-Bearing if There Is No Burden-Sharing
Glenna Marshall explains something important in this article. “A friend from church called to check on me that Saturday. She knew I’d been having a particularly rough time, and when I expressed how poorly I was doing and how embarrassed I was to miss a service project when I look completely normal to anyone watching, my friend gently rebuked me…”
2022 Reading Challenge for Kids and Teens
Redeemed Reader has announced their annual reading challenge for kids and teens.
Flashback: Why We Know So Little About Jesus’ Birth
We know so little about Jesus’ birth. While it has been the subject of billions of dramatizations and endless speculations, the historian Luke gives it all of one sentence

The Christian’s armor will rust except it be furbished with the oil of prayer. —William Gurnall

Good morning. Grace and peace to you.

Westminster Books has a sale on the fledgling EBTC commentary series which has gotten off to a very strong start with volumes by James Hamilton, Thomas Schreiner, Andreas Köstenberger, and others. It’s great to begin collecting a series when it has only just begun!
(Yesterday on the blog: The Legend of the Battle-Weary Crusader)
My Christmas Gift Bought with a Child’s Heart
I love this one. “Suddenly shy, my six-year-old hesitated, a worried brow replaced his eagerness. His eyes lost some of their shiny dance. Grasped between small hands of offering, he stretched it toward me, then sat back on his haunches. Behind him, lights from the tree twinkled, a kaleidoscope halo of color. His eyes never left mine, and I recognized how desperately he desired to please me with his present. I saw bare longing in his wide broody dark blue eyes. I felt their desire.”
God’s Plan When Our Plans Fail
I think you’ll enjoy reading some thoughts from John Piper on how God’s plan proceeds even when our plans fail.
“Millions are Dying Without Christ”: Thinking Through a Popular But Insufficient Reason to Move Overseas
“There’s much to love about this impulse. … And yet, I try to remind my Christian friend that this fact by itself isn’t a sufficient motivation for someone to enter cross-cultural ministry. For at least two reasons.”
Finding a Church That Suits Our Every Need and Desire Is Not the Ultimate Purpose of Church
Benjamin Watson says, rightly, that “finding a church that suits my every need and desire is NOT the ultimate purpose of attending church. The primary purpose of church is gathering together in song, prayer, proclamation, and admonition to worship the Lord. Church is about Him, not me.”
A Great Way To Make Friends
Yes, it really can be this simple.
Comfort for Christian Parents of Unconverted Children
Jim Elliff: “All Christian parents wish that God would show us something to do to secure our child’s salvation, and then ‘we’ll do it with all our might’ because we love our child so much. Yet, God has not made salvation the effect of somebody else’s faith; our son or daughter must come to Christ on his or her own.”
Flashback: Momentary Obedience, Forever Honor
How do we show honor to our parents, especially when we are adults?

There are some of us old-fashioned Christians, who still believe that a loving God creates dark nights as well as bright noon-days; that he not only permits trouble, but sometimes sends troubles on his own children for their spiritual profit. —Theodore Cuyler

Of all the pursuits that come with the Christian life, is any more constant, any more consuming, and any more difficult than the pursuit of humility? Surely nothing cuts harder against the grain of our natural, sinful humanity than to be humble before God and humble before our fellow man.

Yet God calls us to display humility. He warns that he opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. So how do we become humble? Or, to say it another way, how do we humble ourselves? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it! Give me a course I can take, a list I can check off, a procedure I can follow, and I’ll keep at it until I’m properly humble! But as David Mathis points out in his new book Humbled: Welcoming the Uncomfortable Work of God, such an attitude is all wrong because it elevates us too much. “In contrast to this attitude, the humble-self theme in Scripture turns our human instincts and assumptions upside down. Yes, this is indeed a biblical directive. And at the same time, it’s not something we can just up and do. We cannot humble ourselves by our own bootstraps.” There is no simple plan to follow, no course to take, no step-by-step procedure. That’s because …

… we humans are not the drivers of our own humility. Our God designs the humbling way in which he forges the virtue of humility. He takes the initiative. He acts first. Our humility happens on his terms. He sees. He knows. He moves, with sovereign, omnipotent, meticulous care. He is intimately engaged with his created world and with each of his creatures. He is the one who humbles us with his mighty hand, and when his humbling hand descends and we’re cut to our knees or flat on the ground, then the question comes to us: Will you humble yourself and embrace God’s humbling hand, or will you try to fight back?
Will you receive his humbling providences, or attempt to explain them away?
Will you soften to him in humility, or harden with pride?
True self-humbling is not our initiative, but it does require our doing as we learn to welcome the uncomfortable work of God.

That uncomfortable work, and our response to it, is the theme of Mathis’s book. In its eight brief chapters he offers a study of the Bible’s humble-self language. Specifically, he follows the lead of the “humble-self” texts “for what we might discover not as much about humility in general, though that’s not unimportant, but specifically (and practically) about what it means to pursue humility, and especially to humble-self, when God is the one who initiates our humbling, not us.”
So he asks first “How do I humble myself?” and explains how God humbles us through our response to his Word and his work. He shows the importance of providence, Scripture, prayer, fasting, and local church fellowship in God’s working out of our humility. He explains how we can think less of ourselves and think of ourselves less. He shows how most ultimately, humility is the means through which we admit to ourselves, to others, and to God himself, “I am not God.” In that way, it is “a posture of soul and body and life that acknowledges and welcomes the godness of God and the humanness of self.”
All-in-all, Humbled is as helpful a book as you’ll find on the essential but oh-so-difficult task of becoming humble—of responding appropriately to God’s pursuit of our humility. I highly recommend it.

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