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The decorations come down, the calendar turns, and Christmas recedes into memory—but Matthew 2 insists there’s something that doesn’t go out of season. And if the Gospel doesn’t go out of season, are we keeping ourselves focused on where it is pointing us?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Do you have a choice? Yes. I am not afraid of anything. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of anything. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. Do you have a choice? Yes. I am not afraid of anything. That is the way it is. I am not afraid of anything. That is the way it is. That is the way it is. That is controlled as if we are discarded. The same can be said, in our nativity scene.
The funny thing is we usually put the wise men there. They are not there. They probably come quite a bit after the manger scene. They are traveling and it takes time for them to put all the pieces together. That is what we are going to be thinking about tonight. What they are doing, and what is remarkable about them, is that they aren’t Jews. They aren’t people of the land. They are coming from a distant place.
Today we can travel anywhere in about a day if you get the right air flights and everything goes correctly. But at the time it was a big ordeal. They come because they are trying to listen to God. And they hear, and God uses them. We are going to be thinking about how do we listen to God? How do we boldly go into this year so that as we think about a brand new year with all the opportunities in it, that we take what we have been celebrating over Christmas and we don’t leave it there.
Some people have already taken down their decorations. Some people are like me and trying to figure out any reason why we could leave them up a bit longer. But here is the thing we need to do, friends. Whether the decorations stay up or they are down, what we don’t want to do is leave the point of Christmas behind. I think maybe once we actually reflect on where the wise men fall into the story, that they are not there on Christmas Day. They are coming later. It reminds us that the implications don’t stop.
There isn’t a pause. There isn’t a 30-year pause. There are things happening in between, and we get just a few little insights there, but a few people who as they listen to God, they hear and they respond. And there is no reason to think that they were the only ones. They are just examples. And in that we see what happens when we listen to God and how God uses us. But are we prepared to? Do we know how to? If we think about the wise men, we are going to explore the ways that they knew how, but there are all kinds of things happening around us, and we don’t even know they are going on.
For example, I learned something this past week. Did you know that if someone makes mud bricks… Has anyone here made mud bricks? I have not. But if you make mud bricks, there is enough magnetic material in the soil that as you bake the brick, the magnets are turning just like a magnet does. Little microscopic magnets in that mud brick. And if someone looks later on, they can see which way was north when the brick was baked. I thought that was really remarkable.
It came up in the context of archaeologists in Israel looking at the biblical site of Gath, a place where the Philistines lived. And there have been many people who were skeptical that the story happened as the Scriptures described it. Because the Scriptures talk about King Hazel, one of the enemies of Israel, the Philistines, and he came in, attacked the city, and it says, burnt it to the ground.
Well, they found these bricks, but as archaeologists who were skeptical looked at these bricks, they said, no one in the land of Canaan actually had the technology to build with baked bricks at the time. It required too hot a furnace. They didn’t know how to do that.
Actually, I just got that wrong. See, I’m still trying to get all this mud brick stuff down. Here’s what they said. They said, well, these bricks were from an advanced culture, one that had more technology than the people in Gath. Because, you see, they looked at these bricks, and they had the magnets all frozen in them from baking, just like you’d expect if you knew this.
And they said, there’s no way that King Hazel came in there and set the city on fire. What happened was eventually the city was abandoned and the bricks sort of fell to and fro, and they must have been baked ahead of time. They’d been imported from a land that knew how to bake them because they didn’t do that in Canaan.
Well, here’s what they found as they looked at them. They examined these bricks, and they realized that all the bricks, as they were laying in rubble as they dug them up, were pointing in the same direction. These little magnets. Imagine all these little magnets in there. Just like so many arrows to God’s truth, these magnets were pointing to the fact that the city had actually caught fire.
Because here’s the thing that they realized. If you bake a bunch of bricks in a kiln, and then you haul them off from wherever, maybe from a different country, you bring them to the land, and you start building a wall, you don’t have little arrows pointing on them. Here is which way goes north. It doesn’t matter. If you’re doing masonry and you’re putting in bricks, you just put them in and they fit. They’re good. It doesn’t matter.
So if the bricks had already been baked and they’d been knocked over at some point, they just collapsed, they would be pointing in all kinds of different random directions. But if they had fallen during the battle, and then the city was put on fire, and they baked in that fire in the city, and that’s when the magnets froze, they’d all be pointing the same way. And that’s exactly what happened.
God’s truth was worn out by a bizarre little bit of detail that goes way above my head in exactly how it works, about how you bake mud bricks. Someone happened to be listening closely enough that they found that. Well, you and I may never need to know that, and you might say, I’m trying to understand what to do with my life. Why are you telling me about mud bricks, Tim?
But here’s the thing. All of us have opportunities to listen to what God’s doing. It may not be about mud bricks. It may be a million other things. It may be, how do I serve my neighbor? Where should I be working? And what should that look like? It may be a million different things, but in each of our lives, we have those mud bricks laying on the ground, and we have to look and discern where are the arrows pointing? Where is God speaking? And that is what the wise men do.
So let’s go ahead and pray and ask the God who helped them make sense of what was going on around them, and help us to see the arrows in our own lives as well, so that we can be pointed in the right direction. Let’s pray.
Father, too often, we don’t even realize the arrows are there. We’re not even looking for them. We just assume, like so many of those archaeologists assume, there wouldn’t be anything there to the truth of Scripture. And yet, when someone was willing to listen, they found it, and they saw it. And what did they see? They saw that it affirmed your word.
Lord, would you help us to be in your word this year, to hear the call of your Spirit, that we would see which way you’re pointing us as well. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So what are the mud bricks for the magi, the wise men? Sometimes we call them, we three kings, right? We’re going to sing that in a moment after the sermon. And they probably weren’t kings, and I know some people say, well, then you shouldn’t sing the song, but listen to the rest of the words to that song. It’s a wonderful, wonderful song with so much truth in it, even if they weren’t kings.
They were important, though. They were important people. They were people who had no reason to worry about some backwater place. And let’s be clear about the state of Israel in this time. Yes, it’s an elite, advanced economy today, but it wasn’t then. It was the place that you got assigned in the Roman Empire if you weren’t favored that much. There were much better places to be, as far as anyone who wasn’t a Jew was concerned. And if you weren’t even in the Roman Empire, someplace further east, maybe Persia, who cares about Israel?
These wise men were listening. Take a look at Matthew 2, verse 1. It says, “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose, and have come to worship him.’”
There’s so much going on in just a few words here. And notably, not the things we normally think. They’re not kings, and we’re not told that there’s three of them. That’s not what’s mentioned here. What is mentioned, though, is that we have wise men, or magi, from the east, possibly in what had been known as Babylon. That sort of area. So, the area where the Jews had been exiled to at one point and then returned from. There were still many Jews there. And they were out there. They were not Jewish, but they became acquainted with the God of the Jews and his word because the Jews had been exiled there, presumably.
That’s a good reason why we think that’s where they’re coming from. And so what did they do? Here were men who wanted to understand the world. Well, those archaeologists I was talking about, they wanted to understand the world. And someone along the line had to look at something like the magnetic direction of these particles in a brick and didn’t really know what that was going to accomplish, but wanted to know so they would understand how it worked when suddenly it became relevant. That’s how we discover lots of things, right? People experimenting, not even necessarily knowing what they’re going to accomplish with it, or accomplishing something they didn’t intend.
And for these wise men, they come in contact with these people’s books of wisdom about how the world came into being. And even if they didn’t fully understand who the God of the Bible was, maybe you’re joining us tonight and you’re not quite sure who the God of the Bible is. What do they do? They said, but there’s wisdom in here and we want to understand it. We want to know. We may not know. We may not fully comprehend, but we want to know.
And so, presumably, this is how it plays out. God exiles the people of Judah to the land of Babylon as part of the judgment against them for their unfaithfulness. And we know that story. We find it in the Old Testament. Eventually, at the end of the Old Testament, they’re back in the land, at least partially, back home. And then we have the period between the Testaments, the time between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, where the people go through different phases but seem to at least want to follow God’s law. They study it a lot. And we get, what do we get? We get the Pharisees. We get people who understand the letter of God’s law very, very well. Better than any of us here probably will ever understand it.
They could recite off every contingent possibility on how you might violate God’s law. And that’s what happened because the Jews were exiled to Babylon. But something else happened. They left something behind. And we know at least three men who were impacted by that, or more. We don’t know how many wise men there were, but we know that these wise men, whatever size group or entourage, came from the East, they were also impacted.
As God moved his people to Babylon and back, he wasn’t just moving his people around, giving them a tour of the world. He was leaving the truth of his word in the places that they were, much like as he moves us around, sometimes willingly, sometimes happily, sometimes unhappily. Everywhere we go, we should be shedding God’s word behind us, everyone not letting go of it, continuing to carry it with us, but leaving it there as well.
And that’s what happened, intentionally or not. And so these people studied it, they studied the prophecies, and then they see this astronomical phenomena they may not fully understand. We don’t fully understand exactly what the star was, how it comes into being. Lots of speculation. Was it a supernova? Was it this? Was it that? Was it some kind of comet? I don’t know.
This side of eternity, none of us will ever be able to say that for sure. But what we do know is they saw something in the sky. God made something appear. And they saw it, and they remembered what they’d read about the prophecies of a coming king that would be not just of interest to Israel, but to the entire world. A king so important that they had their busy lives of scholarship, serving whatever leaders they served in their land, and they said, you know, as important as that is, we need to listen to God. We need to travel.
And so they made all the necessary provisions, and they took the finest gifts they could find, and they packed them all up, and they set off, and they went. I have to think when they studied those prophecies initially, they didn’t have any idea. And notably, unlike us, this is something that’s different for us because we have Google, and now we have ChatGPT. We have these things. You can type something in. Sometimes they’ll give you an answer back that’s true. But you can type something in, have no clue of the answer, and it will give you an answer.
How did you get an answer back in those days? If you wanted to know, is there a prophecy in the scriptures of the Hebrews about a coming king that would be shown by signs in heaven, you couldn’t type it into Bing. There was no Bing. There was no Google. There was nothing like that. The only way that you knew that if you were a wise man that wanted to be aware of what was going on in the world is you just studied and studied and studied and remembered so that when something happened, you could put the pieces together. That’s what they’d done.
Temptation today can be to say, well, I don’t really need to study God’s Word because when the moment comes and I have a question, I’ll just type it into Google. Google will tell me. 2 Corinthians 3:16 says, “All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Incidentally, in the context of what it’s saying there, we can say the women of God as well. This is men and women of God.
But what God’s saying there is God is training us when we study His Word. He was training the wise men, and He’s training us. Why do we do verse-by-verse study of the Bible when we have our different sermon series here? A lot of people have moved away from that. It can seem kind of dated to some people. You know, it’d be so much more exciting if you just did a 10-week series on 10 ways to improve your life. But every single word that God has written improves our life.
We could label every single week the next part in our series, How to Improve Your Life, because if we’re reading God’s Word, we may not know it in the moment, but God is improving our lives. We don’t need to come up with some novel series that reconstructs Scripture. We can just read the Word of God. The wise men were reading the Word of God. They didn’t know why they needed to know this. They didn’t know that the King of the Jews would be born during their lifetime or it’d have any relevance to them. I’m sure they didn’t think that they’d be written down for all eternity in God’s Word after that. But they read it because they sensed something about the truth in it. And as they sensed that, they said, I think I should know this. And they studied it. It’s what God’s calling us to do too.
How many of you in school had to go through a fire drill? Made a tornado drill as well, right? Okay, so I think I saw every hand. Now let me ask you another question. Were you safer when you were drilling for a fire or for a tornado? I don’t think so. Maybe, you know, actually I bet if you got someone who, some insurance agent who has all the actuarial tables and everything else and they’ve come up with statistics for everything, I bet you’d find there’s a certain number of people who are injured whenever a fire drill takes place. Someone trips, someone falls, someone gets a little too nervous.
I know one dear friend, he can’t stand the noise of the fire alarm. It just freaks him out. Someone, you know, freaks out a little too much, has a heart attack. All those sorts of things, you’d find those things happen and you’d probably find that there’s a certain number of injuries that you might actually be less safe when you’re in the fire drill than before or after it.
Well, then why would you do it? There’s nothing happening in the moment that seems to make you safer. Well, you do it so that if a fire happens, you know how to get out, right? Incidentally, there’s only one door here, so if you’re trying to get out of Little Hills, go that way. If you’re watching online, don’t necessarily go by my finger. You could jump out the window. No guarantees on how many bones break as you do. I’d go that way if possible.
It doesn’t make you safer in the moment, but it’s training you so that if it happens, and hopefully it never does, right? I hope that none of us actually ever benefit from taking cover during a tornado warning. The reason we don’t benefit is we never get hit by a tornado. Not that it’s so big that it doesn’t matter, but that it doesn’t matter because it never happens.
That would be really nice, but why do we train for it? Why do we prepare for it? Why do we go down in the basement and take shelter when it happens? Because if it does happen, right, we’re prepared.
Are we doing that with God’s Word? Do we have Bible drills? I know there’s an old tradition of the sword drill, and it’s sort of like that. If you come from certain parts of church tradition, you’ve heard that term. The idea of training up kids to know exactly, they’d have races, who can turn to a certain book of the Bible the fastest. It might be fun someday to do that.
The point of it was, know God’s Word well enough that when you know where you know something’s happened, you have something you’re struggling with, you can go to it. That’s why we memorize Scripture. Some of us are better than others of us at that. I’m a terrible memorizer of things. That’s not something I am great at, but why memorize Scripture? Why at least try to get the tone of it? Why read it over and over so that at least the ebb and flow of it is in your mind?
It’s so that when something happens, you know that God speaks to it. The wise men had read it enough that when something happened, they knew that God’s Word spoke to it, and they were able to act on that then. They were able to boldly go. You can’t boldly go someplace when you don’t know you need to go. But God’s Word speaks to that.
Now, how do we do that? I’ve mentioned this before, I’ll mention it again. You don’t need to be legalistic about it, but can I urge each one of us to consider having a Bible reading plan? Not because by having a Bible reading plan, you are instantly holy. Or that if you never miss a day of the Bible reading plan, you now are holy. Or if you completed your Bible reading plan a certain number of times, now you are holy. It’s not something like that.
It’s like a fire drill. It’s like saying, God, I want you to help me to understand your Word, and here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to read it every day. If every day sounds too daunting at first, every other day. It doesn’t have to be a whole chunk. You don’t have to say, I’m going to read the whole Bible in 90 days or a year. You don’t have to start at the beginning and go all the way through Leviticus the very first time and get stuck like so many have deserted out in the wilderness before. Start someplace.
Start in the New Testament. Read Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. Go read Romans. Go read Philippians. We should read through the whole Testament too. But just start.
The perfect fire drill may never happen, but if you keep waiting for the perfect fire drill, people are going to die in the fire. You go and you have a fire drill, and it might be imperfect, but at least you’re training for if the fire happens.
And likewise, our reading through the Bible may be imperfect, but at least it’s happening, and God will use that. God will honor that.
So often we say, why is God so silent? And oftentimes He’s most silent when we’re not in His Word. Because isn’t it amazing, and I think most of you have exclaimed to me at some point on this, that you’re reading God’s Word, and you’re reading it just not because you looked up a certain thing that speaks to the current moment, but because you’re just reading through something, and there’s a verse that speaks directly to what you’re struggling with that God puts before you. God uses His Word as we’re reading it to speak to us.
And if we want to hear from God, what should we do? We should be in His Word. And so here we are, brand new year. Maybe you’ve made some resolutions. Maybe you’ve already broken some of them. Today’s a great day to start a Bible reading plan. And if you don’t know where to start, talk to me. I’d be glad to throw out some ideas. But start a Bible reading plan. Just do it.
I’m going to get myself in trouble with all kinds of lawyers tossing out all kinds of trademark things. But just do it. Read God’s Word. Be in it so that, like the wise men, when God is speaking to us, when things happen, we actually know where God is working.
Second thing, though. And this is the other part of that where I said it’s not going to make you holy. It isn’t enough simply to read God’s Word. The wise men wanted to follow it. The wise men wanted to encounter God in it.
Note that Herod goes to the scholars of the land, the people that knew God’s Word the best of anyone.
Verse 3 of Matthew 2: When Herod the king heard this, what the wise men had said, he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him. And assembling all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.
They told him, in Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet, “And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah. For from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.”
And Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared.
So note here, well, for one, no one noticed in the land of Israel it would seem that the star had appeared. Now, there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. Some of the other peoples of the region worshipped the stars and God told the people not to do that. And maybe just to be safe, they just didn’t try to pay very much attention to them. That’s entirely possible. But now they’ve been told, hey, you know, this thing happened, the star appeared, what should we make of that? It appears that your king has been born. We want to find him.
And Herod summons the scribes and the Pharisees, the experts in the law. He calls them from the Ivy League of Jerusalem, you know, the person from Harvard and the person from MIT and the person from Princeton, all the foremost experts of the entire land come. They have 10 PhDs each, all in biblical studies. They all know the stuff. They’re on all the cable news talking head shows whenever someone wants to ask anything about the Bible. These are the experts. They come up. Herod calls them in. He starts a panel being broadcast, live-streamed on YouTube, I’m sure, and says, okay, we have these visitors and they say a king’s been born. Where is this king?
I say, oh, okay, so the star, yeah. We know exactly the answer to that. He’s in Bethlehem.
But what are we told happens? Well, we’re told several things. We’re told that Herod’s troubled. We’re told all of Jerusalem, presumably, especially the elites, the scholarly, the people who are supposed to know what was going on, they’re troubled.
What we’re not told is that any of them actually go to Bethlehem. Where do they go? Apparently nowhere.
So here we have three wise men from the east, the people that aren’t supposed to know the Lord, that happen to stumble across the writings of this god from a backwater country as far as they’re concerned, but decided maybe there’s something to this, and now they’ve set their mission to find this king that God has promised.
They’re going out of their way, way out of their way. Maybe even they’re a laughingstock back in their own country. You’re going where? You’re going to go there? Really? You’re going to take what there? You’re going to take all these fine things to there? You’ve got to be kidding me.
They want to hear from the Lord. There’s something here. And all the people who had spent all that time studying God’s word, they had their Bible reading plans. But why did they have Bible reading plans? They had Bible reading plans and you know what? I have a Bible reading plan. And you know what? My Bible reading plan is better than your Bible reading plan. My Bible reading plan goes through the Bible 10 times a year.
But you can’t do that. They knew God’s word, but they weren’t looking to encounter God in it. And when confronted with it, they don’t do anything. They just give the information and they go away. Herod gets the information and actively rebels against God. He says, okay, if God’s promised a king is going to rise up there, well, God may be doing that, but I bet he didn’t see this coming. I’ll just murder every child under the age of two. That way, whatever age that kid is, he’s toast. No one’s going to take my throne.
Sometimes we’re in that place. We’re saying, you know, God’s trying to do this, but I am not going to allow this to happen because this is not what I want. And we’re like Herod. A lot of times, we just fall into that indifference of the scribes and the Pharisees. They’re troubled because they don’t want Herod to be unhappy. They’re troubled because everything’s going pretty smoothly for them at the moment. And they’re troubled because maybe something will change and won’t make them as important.
And they say, well, we’ll give the information, but we’re not going to do anything about it. They knew the details, but they had to put them together. And that reminds me of what is pretty amazing, I think, about those mud bricks I was talking about earlier. Let’s really get into the mud on this subject, shall we?
You think about this. How did they know to look for magnetic material? Well, I’m sure there’s all kinds of experts in chemistry and other scientific fields, geology. I suppose I would fall into geology. But you have these experts that have studied, and they understand what the composition of clay is. They understand what the composition of rock is. They know these things. They start to understand how they work at a molecular level and so on.
But what’s it take? It takes someone then who’s an archaeologist who goes and seeks that expert opinion and learns it, but then applies it to what’s actually happening and says, oh, I can see what these bricks are pointing to. I can see that it’s pointing to the fact that scripture actually is true on a matter that people have doubted.
All that knowledge of the molecules in themselves doesn’t do any good. It’s applying it and wanting to apply it. It’s someone taking all the stuff they’ve learned and saying, I want to actually see this play out.
And that’s the two parts, the tension here that we see in the wise men. They’re doing all the study. Study is important. And then they’re wanting to encounter God in that study. They don’t want that study there just so that they can say, I’ve learned a lot. I’m important. I’m going to be known throughout history as a wise man.
I don’t think that’s what mattered to them. What mattered to them is that they were going to encounter the Messiah. And they did. And all those people who had been praying for God’s rescue, all those people wondering, where is God in this situation? All those people who were saying, when is God finally going to send His King, walked around those first days after Jesus’ birth totally clueless to the fact that the King had been born, that the King was there, that someday He would take their sins to the cross.
While these people from a distant land studying God’s Word, wanting to be receptive to God, heard. And God brought them and allowed them into His presence. What an incredible, incredible thing that is. Are we receptive? Are we hearing what God’s doing?
You know, I bet if you found one of those chemists or those geologists that could explain what was going on, they could probably explain a lot of things really incredibly well. Some of them, for example, could explain how you make pigments for paints, right? You crush up these particular rocks or you combine the chemicals and you get this particular vivid color or that color.
But I would imagine no matter how much they could explain how the paint works, they’re not going to paint the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo, on the other hand, may not have understood how the chemicals came together to form the exact colors they did, but here’s what he did. He had a gift to take that paintbrush and take those things that couldn’t even be fully understood in that era because we didn’t have the ability to go down to the molecular level.
And he could see those raw materials and put them together and he could put them on the tip of a paintbrush, that gift that God had given him, and he could paint something absolutely stunning. A lot of times as we study God’s Word, it feels a lot more like we’re the chemist or the geologist or some other expert and we have some parts, but we’re not really sure what to do with them.
And the wise men maybe felt that way at times. I have to think they probably had bad days at the office where they were there and they were thinking, why am I pouring over these scrolls again? Nothing ever happens in them.
But what they ultimately trust and what we’re called to trust is that the master painter is the one combining all those components we’re not quite sure what we’re doing with and painting a beautiful picture with them. That’s what God does when he sends his Holy Spirit into our lives.
John 14, verse 26, Jesus says, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father hath called by my name, he will teach you all things and bring to you your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
We actually see that in play at the end of the Gospel of Luke. People are mourning the death of Jesus, some of his followers, and they’re walking down the road and they’re talking to Jesus but they don’t recognize him. And he’s explaining the scriptures to them. And finally he reveals himself to them. He lets them know that it’s him and they say, they said to each other, Luke 24:32, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?”
They’d heard the scriptures, they’d heard even Jesus’ words about the scriptures, but the key thing that they recognize in that moment when suddenly they recognize Jesus and suddenly they recognize, no, he really isn’t dead, yes, he really did come back like he said, yes, he has triumphed over death, is that they realize something in their heart.
God’s revealing it to them. God’s applying it to them. He’s taking those little bits of pigment here and there and mixing them together and creating a beautiful paint and then brushing that onto their lives in a way that brings together the truth of the gospel.
How do we have God do that in our lives? Well, it’s a cyclical process. We need him to understand his word and we need to be in his word to understand him. So where do we start that process? We pick up the Bible and start reading it and we start praying to God and we start saying, God, I want to go boldly into this year and I want to see what you’re painting in my life.
So God, I don’t understand necessarily why I’m reading about the wise men tonight or I don’t understand why I’m in the middle of Exodus reading about different laws. But I understand this, that you’re the God of the universe and I want to know what you want me to hear. I want to see what you want me to see.
And in the moment, it might feel kind of unfulfilling. Think about if you set your mind to anything, though. Maybe you decide this year you’re going to learn a language. I heard lots of advertisements before Christmas. Give a perfect New Year’s resolution to your loved ones. Give them the gift of this language learning package. I can imagine the delight on most people’s faces when they open up and think, oh, great, I get to do memorization. Oh, I’m so excited. Or maybe you were excited. Maybe you’ve really been wanting to learn Chinese or something. You think, okay, now I’m going to know this.
But here’s the thing, if you’ve tried to learn a language or you have learned a language. Was it very much fun at first? I don’t know anyone who says, I just love the first few months of studying a language when I’m learning all kinds of things and can’t put them together into anything enjoyable, anything meaningful. Or maybe you resolved this year you’re going to go on an exercise plan. You signed up for a gym membership. You got a new piece of whatever the trendy exercise equipment is at the moment.
And you can tell I didn’t do that one. And it’s going to be great this year. And maybe you got, you’re going to go biking this year. Jim, he’s on vacation. I don’t know if he’s going to get to bike on vacation. But I’d imagine he’ll do some biking again very soon after he gets back. At least he bikes all the time. If I went biking with him, I would be incredibly sore after biking with him because it would hurt to bike the way he bikes.
I mean, he goes tons and tons of miles every time he goes biking. It takes pain. It takes practice to get to the point where suddenly that’s an enjoyable thing, right? Because it’s sort of at first, oh, I’m just sore. Oh, I don’t think I ever want to do that again.
And sometimes that’s the way it is when we’re reading God’s Word. We think, this just hurts. It hurts my brain. I don’t know how to put this together. We say, God, give me the endurance to keep doing it. Help me to keep doing it.
Because here’s the thing, as we trust in God, as we want to encounter him, he’s faithful to take those words, even when it just feels like we’re just stretching the muscles of our mind and it just hurts and we’re just stiff. He takes that and he applies it and he enables us to understand how he’s working. And he equips us then to do more.
And as men and women of God, we are equipped to stand as those who are called by him. We can’t make sense of anything in our lives on our own, but God is faithful to explain and to enable us to go boldly into this year and into every year to come.
Let’s pray that he helps us to do that. Father, each of us brings our own joys and sorrows into this new year, our own concerns and goals. As we try to make sense of those, Lord, would you help us that we would understand where you’re coming from and where you’re going and where you’re calling us, and we would understand those places that you’re speaking to us, that you’d help us to be in your words so we would hear your voice, and that we’d be reminded of your presence with us each and every step of the way.
When we’re tired, when we’re weary, when we’re confused, would you remind us of your presence? Would you help us to want to not just know things but to encounter you in them? And then, like the wise men, to do so. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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