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CHRISTIANS MAKE A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS LIST #5

POWER IN LEFTOVER BOXES

And now we have to say, “Well, kids, let’s get this mess cleaned up.”  After all the fun and festivities, the day AFTER Christmas, and the wrapping paper and the torn-up tinsel and the mangled bows all have to go into the trash.  And the tree’s a bit faded by now; we may keep it up over the weekend, but it’s soon got to go too.

However, in a couple of senses, the Christmas spirit still lingers . . . and that’s what we want to talk about here for a few moments.

Many of you know, of course, that December 26 is Boxing Day. In Canada, as my family all knows, it’s a legal holiday, along with in the U.K. and many other countries.  And probably all of us have enough boxes lying around there in the living room to feel like we qualify, but that’s not what Boxing Day is for.  No, here on the 26th, people like the postman and other public servants are supposed to get presents from the rest of us.  It’s actually kind of a nice tradition — and today, especially if your trash is picked up on a Friday, why not have a little gift for the man who’s served your neighborhood so well all through 2000?

It’s always hard to have the Christmas season come to an end.  And really, for the Christian it doesn’t have to.  If Jesus Christ is the greatest of all gifts, why should the giving end now? Why can’t it continue right on into all 365 days of 2000?

There’s a quick story I’d like to tell about secrets, and this comes from Tim Stafford’s book, Knowing the Face of God.  He tells the story of a man back in the 1940s who, as a senior at MIT, had a prospective employer come and visit the graduating class; kind of a job fair thing.  And most of the seniors had already made other plans, so they sort of listened with just half an ear.  But he said to their amazement:

“I hope you are attracted to the opportunities I have presented, because I can personally guarantee that every one of you WILL join my company.”

And they all said, “What?!”  As things turned out, this man represented a science-oriented branch of the military, and with World War II raging, sure enough, that whole class ended up being drafted and working on this project.

But there’s more.  One man who worked on this particular  research assignment labored in total secrecy for years.  This stuff was totally classified; he’d been given top clearance.  He was working on things he couldn’t even tell his wife at night, and that’s the absolute truth.

Finally one day, as he went off to work, he said to his wife:  “Be sure to listen to the news on the radio today.  I think you’ll find out what I’ve been doing for all these years.”  You see, he’d spent all of World War II, along with that entire MIT class of students, involved in a little something called the Manhattan Project.  And that day, as his wife listened to the radio, she heard how the Allied forces had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  That was the secret her husband had been forced to keep from her for all these years: the raw, finally harnessed power of the A-bomb.

And now back to us — you and me — and the clutter and the mess of the day after Christmas.  And we’ve wondered and studied all week this question: Do Christians give differently at Christmas?  Are our priorities different?  Did we spend differently for yesterday’s festivities than our non-believing neighbors across the street?  Was your Christmas list noticeably different from the non-Christian people who work in the same office as you do?

As we pack up our boxes, and maybe do a bit more celebrating of Boxing Day or that last, lagging-behind Christmas party, even, this Manhattan Project story comes in to haunt me.  Are there people who have always wondered about me: “What is it with him?  What does he do?  What makes him tick?”  And all along I was in the basement, in the shadows, with my Christian faith.  All that time, maybe for long years, I was in the laboratory linked up to such earthshaking power . . . and they never knew.

Friend, if you’re a Christian believer, then you and I hold in our hands and hearts the keys to life everlasting.  The secret formula, the atomic combination to eternal life . . . we have it!  We know what it is!  It’s Jesus Christ, isn’t it?  And we have Him!

Ken and I have tried to say this one thing all week: take that knowledge and give it away.  Share it.  Give “forever gifts,” we mentioned on Monday.  Let the person of Jesus Christ infuse all your other presents.  Be sure He’s the one thing you share for sure.  Because He really is the perfect Gift, the one that makes every other Christmas present fall into place.

We have here at the office a large compendium of some of C. S. Lewis’ writing: in fact, it’s four bestsellers in one volume.  Plus a full collection of 365 short readings for an entire year.  So naturally, we were interested in the kinds of things that he would have included for the Christmas season.

The reading for December 22 is entitled “The Secret Signature of Each Soul.”  So we return momentarily to the idea of secrets.  And this is from Lewis’ book, The Problem of Pain.  He writes about how each of us is desperate to find that inner something, that longing, that never quite had been filled.  We’ve all known, in our deepest hidden place, that we’re searching for something.  Maybe we don’t have the words to describe it, or even the right kinds of instincts or feelings about it all.  But there’s that something that we sense in our heart has someday got to come to us.  It’s just got to.  He describes this yearning as follows:

“ . . . that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?”  And then he adds this wistful note: “You have never had it.”

Friend, can you relate to that?  If you’re a Christian and already know the answer, I can tell you this: your neighbors are still relating to this big-time.  That void, that indescribable empty place.

But then C. S. Lewis goes on with this line to portray the moment of discovery.  A man or woman finally encounters Jesus Christ.  And how does he or she feel?  Here’s how he puts it:

“Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’”

Isn’t that tremendous? “I was MADE for this!  At last!  This is it!  I’ve found it at last.”  As negative and destructive as that Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb was, this is as powerful and lifesaving on the other end of the spectrum.  At last!  The formula that unleashes not just power, but complete and permanent joy.

In the very next reading, this one for December 29, and still borrowing from the same book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis talks about heaven in almost the same kind of way.  What will it be like to be there? he asks.  Will it have that same feeling of being the exact thing we needed?  Well, here are his words:

“God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.  Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

Let me say again, friend: if you’re a Christian like I am, then this is what we know!  This is our secret! 

And it’s this Gift God wants to give to not just us, but to the world around us.  Our radio audience.  The people you know and I know.  That trash man who’s coming down the road right now.  He’s got to know. 

Yesterday if you tuned in during all your Christmas parties, you remember that we had a few moments of nostalgia thinking about the late Princess Diana.  What gift could someone like me have given her?  What gift could have counted to royalty, a person who already has a crown on their head and millions of pounds in Swiss bank accounts?  Well, the Bible talks about a crown that God wants to give each of us.  But in a beautiful sense, it’s more than a crown.  Here’s the verse, found in Revelation 2:10:

“Be faithful, even to the point of death,” Jesus challenges us.  And then He makes this promise: “And I will give you the crown of life.”

That’s an exceptional promise, isn’t it?  When we hang in there with Jesus Christ, during the happy Christmas times and then during the post-Christmas times that maybe are not quite so joy-filled, He promises to give us “(quote) the crown of life.”  And we’ve probably all pictured that crown as being something tangible you and I can wear on our heads in the Holy City.  Which I have no doubts will be very real indeed.

But in a deeper, more lasting sense, I believe God is promising us the eternal life itself.  Not just the crown, but also the rich life, the forever life, that the crown represents.  We have Jesus Himself, and the priceless immortality, the eternity that only He can give.

And you know, as we studied through the New International Version’s text notes for Revelation 2:10, we find that exact sentiment.  Here it is:

“The crown that IS eternal life.”

That’s what we have, you and I.  The crown that IS eternal life.  And it’s Boxing Day — still a time for giving, for sharing, with someone who doesn’t yet have that Christmas present.  In fact, I think I hear the postman coming up my driveway right now.