Countdown to Christmas - Day 1: Christmas with Haste | Aggressive Life

Welcome to the Grass of Life. It is nearly Christmas. Most of us love Christmas or we want to love Christmas and part of why Christmas may have lost its luster is we've lost the meaning of Christmas. We may be able to answer the questions right about what Christmas means, but how we're putting it into our lives and into our hearts and our spirits on a day-by-day, moon-by-moon basis may not be very good. So what we're doing different for the aggressive life over this week is we're gonna give you four teachings, little devotionals, if you will, that will help you just recapture the essence of what you want for this Christmas. Some of this stuff came out in a email that I did a couple years ago, because I think about these things pretty frequently. By the way, I have an email list you can subscribe to, and I give you some original content every couple weeks, once a month. It varies, but you can sign up for that. If you do, you might have gotten a devotional that I did on Thanksgiving every day during Thanksgiving week, and I did something similar with Christmas a couple years ago. This stuff is just things that I think about and are baked into my heart. So I want to bring them out for you. So here we go. Day number one, we're calling Christmas with Haste. And the verse I want to read is Luke 2, verse 16. It's the verse that comes after the angels come to the shepherds and tell shepherds that the Messiah is being born, and it's in Bethlehem, and they make their way to see Mary and Joseph and this Christ child. And here's what it says in Luke 2, verse 16. They went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the baby. Lying in a manger, they went with haste.

For many of us, that's part of what we don't like about Christmas. It's too much haste, too much running around, too many things on the calendar, too many things I got to do. We have all of our normal life and then more layered on top of it. The layer on of the Christmas parties, the company party, the letters I got to get out, the decorations I got to get out, the presents I got to buy, and we just rush all over the place. And that's part of why Christmas is a stressful holiday for us. It's the haste. And yet it says here, the shepherds made haste, went with haste. This is not to authenticate our decisions to have a stressful holiday. It's instead to say there comes a time to move and there comes a time to do it quickly, quickly. Don't wait around. Make haste. Shepherds hear from angels and they're like, Hey, we got to go chop, chop. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Our culture will do everything it can to get you to be stressed out and freaked out. Simultaneously, our culture will do everything it can to keep you from quickly making spiritual changes to your life that you need to make. Oh, it's OK. God understands. Oh, in His own time, in His own way. Well, God closes a door, He opens a window. Yeah, so you can jump out of it. We just have all these things of acceptance, of lackadaisical spiritual behavior. And there's things that you need to do and I need to do. It needs to be done like now.

As I say in my family, chop, chop, like now. The shepherds went to it quickly. What is the thing this Christmas season that you need to do immediately? Christmas is about the Christ coming into the world, bringing salvation, bringing forgiveness. Here's one, here's one. If you want that, you make haste and you need to forgive the people who have hurt you. Like now, stop putting it off. You don't need to process it anymore. You need to talk to your therapist about it anymore. You don't need to, you know, no, just do it. Just do it. Whether you tell that person or not, let it go. Let it go. That's the word in the New Testament called ephemi. Jesus says, forgive your brother 70 times seven. It's the word ephemi. It doesn't mean you have 490 conversations of forgiveness with the same person. It just means you get into habit of going, I release it. I let it go, it's worth forgiveness. Make haste. Maybe you make haste of getting your finances in order, whatever they have done. When this Christmas, I am making haste, bam, bam, bam. Maybe you need to make haste of articulating your faith to somebody, make haste of, I don't know what it is. Make haste of reaching out to your neighbor, maybe taking them some eggnog, doing something nice for them. Do something quickly, quickly that you know God wants done. Don't wait on it, do it immediately.

So get moving, two ideas for you. One is what's the last thing you know God wanted you to do and that you didn't act on, do that right now. Make the phone call, give the money, bless the stranger. Speedy obedience is the best kind of obedience. Number two, second thing to think about in making haste is spend the next 24 hours just asking God, God, is there something you want me to do? Is there a place I'm supposed to be? Just be silent and see if He prompts you. Sit in silence tomorrow morning or right now for five minutes and see what comes to you. And when you get something, just do it ASAP. And if you're not sure, is that God or not? Well, when you hear that thing, if you think to yourself, I think that's the kind of thing that Jesus would generate in my mind or Jesus would approve, then just assume it was God. Just do, go, move. The best way to encourage God to speak to you is to do the things you think He's told you. So make haste, have a great Christmas. That's good for today, we'll see you again tomorrow. Thanks for joining us on this journey toward aggressive living. Find more resources, articles, past episodes, and more at bryantome.com. My new book, A 60 Day Devotional, called The Five Marks for Man, 60 Days to a Powerful Life, along with all the other books in the Five Marks Library

are open right now on Amazon. Be sure to leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Then send an email to dirt, that's dirt, at bryantome.com to get a free Aggressive Life sticker. Find more on Instagram at bryantome. The Aggressive Life is a production of Crossroads Church, Cincinnati, Ohio.