Christmas.... Hope is coming.....The Hope is Here!!

Chris writes: Last summer I felt God was leading me into a deeper love relationship with Him. I felt I had a divine appointment and found in a bookshop an old copy of ‘The Relentless Love of Jesus’ by Brennan Manning. As a dyslexic, I am not a fast reader, but the book took me over a year to read! If you know the book and how thin it is, even to a dyslexic maybe you are amazed by this! I make no apologies. The book is so rich and deep and almost every page I found needed an equal amount of time to meditate on and chew over. So many pages have been marked and underlined, I don’t think I could lend it out or even let it out of my sight! Sorry if you were going to ask to borrow! Don’t worry I noticed you can get it on Amazon!

For the last few weeks, since the operation on my knee, I have been resting at home so had chance to finish the book!

There is so much I could share with you from the book, but as we approach Christmas, let me just share a few thoughts from the last few pages of the book where Manning talks of the: 'Crisis of Christmas'.

‘To be a Christian’ he says ‘means to stake one’s life on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ’. ‘What is our depth and quality of our passion for Jesus?’ At Christmas time it is easy for us to get sucked into all the trappings and tinsel as Christmas, for many, becomes the time to overdo and over indulge, getting ourselves into debt. Will we celebrate Christmas this year by over indulging?

He shares of a priest who visited a 16 year old girl who was dying in hospital. The girl looked into the worried and grief stricken face of the priest and said: ‘“Don't be afraid”. This is the precise meaning of Christian,’ Christmas ‘hope’ Manning says ‘when the dying can say to the living, “Don't be afraid”’. Is that the hope you have?

He says there are three ways we can commit suicide: ‘by taking my own life, letting myself die and letting myself live without hope’. He quotes Thoreau who wrote that: ‘The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation’…. ‘they still walk around……but the fire inside them has died’. Are you still alive?

He asks, if we have lost our sense of fun and enjoyment about life and are missing out on the most simplest of things. ‘Has getting serious about life meant becoming sad about life? Is living just another word for endurance?’ Have we got so ‘engrossed in our own efforts to grow in holiness’ that we are missing out on life?

He says that sometimes we, much like some of the disciples & followers, who lived and walked and learnt from Jesus for three years and still felt let down by Him say: “Messiah, you get our allegiance only when you fulfil our expectations”.

He says that ‘Christmas means that God has given us nothing less than Himself and His name is Jesus Christ’… are we ‘laid waste by one pure passion’, this should lead us to a ‘realistic assessment: anything connected with Christmas that is not centred in Christ Jesus’ is ‘empty gesturing’.

He says we must not be too preoccupied with our own purity of heart…trying to be holy...but that purity of heart means to have our gaze fixed on Jesus and Jesus alone….. To ‘admire Him, rejoice that He is what He is – your Brother, your Friend, your Lord and Saviour’.

He talks about Matthew 18:3, children know how to celebrate Christmas, and Manning says not that we have to become childish but childlike: ‘Children are our role models because they have no claim on heaven. If they are close to God Simon Tugwell says, “it is not because they are innocent, but because they are incompetent.” ‘When Jesus tells us to become like children’ he says ‘He is urging us to forget what lies behind. Children have no past.’

If we asked people in the street on Christmas eve: ‘what they most want for Christmas, how many would say, ‘I want to see Jesus’?

And finally.......

He quotes Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “Jesus Christ is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance”.

I hope these quotes will help you reflect and prepare as we approach Christmas.

Blessings

Recent trip to London: Poppies at Tower Hill