Tuesday, December 29, 2015

When Christmas Turns Into This

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Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Jeff Lampl
 

When Christmas Turns Into This

                              
"When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was a shapeless, chaotic mass,  
with the Spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors.
Then God said, 'Let there be light.' And light appeared.  And God was pleased with it and divided the light from the darkness.
  he called the light 'daytime', and the darkness 'nighttime'.  Together they formed the first day."
Genesis 1:1-5          


Is your house a mess?  Is it like a hurricane ripped through and left everything strewn everywhere?   It is like a “chaotic, shapeless mass” of stuff everywhere?  Maybe you even have “dark vapors” all over the place from spilled drinks to slices of fruitcakes hidden under furniture by guests and family members who hate fruitcake but were afraid to tell you.

Then entire bible starts with God creating order out of Chaos.  Order matters.   All of Genesis one and two are an extension of the first two verse.  God sets up a world where everything has its place, where everything has its function and where humans can flourish within an ordered world as long as they cooperate with that order.  
You and I live within that order.   When my sleep matches the God given time for that sleep, when my time allocations for God, work, marriage and family are ordered and prioritized as God created them to be then life works.  When we arrange our lives in a way that conflicts with order, life doesn’t work.

Each of us is different.  Kathy’s definition of order differs from mine.   Order for Kathy looks like a mess to me but she knows where everything is in that mess.   Order for me means ensuring that everything looks like all’s in order although I rarely know how and where I’ve put anything.   Yet I have to have a neat desk, swept floors, clean surfaces and the impression of organization.   I can’t function happily without it.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “everything must be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40)

The big picture of a life oriented around God’s order for the world is J-O-Y

Jesus
Others
You

What can you decide, discipline yourself to do in 2016, that will order your life so that it matches God’s order and positions to experience God’s peace and joy instead of the splinters that come from going against the grain?
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