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The world tells us that to be great we must be better than others. We must be stronger, richer, more skilled, and so on. If someone is ahead of us we are not, obviously, the best. The Lord redefines greatness. Greatness is not to excel others. Greatness is putting others first. Not only does putting others first make us great; it removes the competition. When we put others first we do not need to feel superior to anyone. We can be content that we have done our part to make the world a better place.

There’s a verse somewhere in the middle of Isaiah that says, “…you shall be collected, one by one….” Someone recently showed me this verse and pointed out that it has important implications for how we approach our relationships with other people and with the Lord.

Who does your life belong to? We know that at least some of it belongs to the Lord so we make an effort to give Him His due share. But what if all of your life, every last bit of it, belongs to the Lord? At first this might seem like a constraining idea. But in fact it can be freeing. We do not have to balance out what is mine and what is His; when we give it all to Him we free ourselves to live our best lives possible.

When we have made the Lord a priority and started to work on living better we often expect things to change dramatically. Sadly, that is not the case. Changes in our external lives are an important beginning but we will not see real change until the change happens in our hearts. When the children of Israel built a house for the Lord not just as a place of worship but also as a state of mind, then the Lord could begin to bless them again.

When the people obey the Lord and rebuild the house of the Lord it doesn’t meet their expectations of what it should be. The Lord’s response to them, through the prophet Haggai, can be very helpful for us when the results of our spiritual efforts aren’t quite what we think they should be.

This Christmas Day, as we celebrate the Lord being born into this world, we will be reflecting on the significance of some of the many different names that that little baby was called.

This Sunday we’ll be talking more about the Christmas story according to the Gospel of John, with a focus on the theme of darkness and light.

Before Jesus could begin His ministry He needed John to prepare the way first. The world at the time was in such a bad state that people could not have taken in Jesus’ teachings if John had not first prepared them and filled them with hope for Jesus’ coming. John did this by bearing witness to Jesus’ Light, so that when that light did come people could recognize it and embrace it.