It' s worth some time, during this annual season of stress, tradition, gifts, and holiday songs to think and renew not only one's sense of charity toward others, but of one's focus on higher things. Take the following as exercises for your mind and heart in a season where both charitable giving, clinical depression, and consumer spending are all running at their annual peak:

We talk glibly of the ‘Christmas spirit,’ rarely meaning more by this than sentimental jollity on a family basis. But what we have said makes it clear that the phrase should in fact carry a tremendous weight of meaning. It ought to mean the reproducing in human lives of the temper of him who for our sakes became poor at the first Christmas." “The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor – spending and being spent – to enrich their fellow humans, giving time, trouble, care and concern, to do good to others – and not just to their own friends – in whatever way there seems need.

- J.I. Packer, Knowing God

DA Carson, in his book The Gagging of God, reminds us of this:

American evangelicalism is in desperate need of intellectual and theological input. We have noted that not a little evangelical television is almost empty of content. It is mawkishly sentimental, naively optimistic, frighteningly ignorant, openly manipulative. Let me again insist; I am not arguing for dry intellectualism, for abstract disputation. But entertainment is not enough; emotional appeals based on tear-jerking stories do not change human behavior; subjective experiences cannot substitute for divine revelation. . . . The mentality that thinks in terms of marketing Jesus inevitably moves toward progressive distortion of him; the pursuit of the next emotional round of experience easily degenerates into an intoxicating substitute for the spirituality of the Word. There is non-negotiable, biblical, intellectual content to be proclaimed....

Finally, Francis Schaeffer in his True Spirituality:

When we say we live in a personal universe and God the Father is our Father, to the extent that we have less than a trusting attitude we are denying what we say we believe. We say that, as Christians, we have by choice taken the place of creatures before the Creator, but as we show a lack of trust, we are exhibiting that at that moment, in practice, we have not really so chosen.The second thing we must comprehend in order to understand a contented heart in the Christian framework, rather than in a non-Christian one, is illustrated by Camus’s dilemma in The Plague. As Christians we say we live in a supernatural universe and that there is a battle, since the fall of man, and that this battle is in both the seen world and the unseen world. This is what we say we believe; we insist on this against the naturalists and against the anti-supernaturalists. If we really believe this, first, we can be contented and yet fight evil, and second, surely it is God’s right to put us as Christians where he judges best in the battle.In a Christian understanding of contentment, we must see contentment in relation to these things. To summarize, there is a personal God. He is my Father since I have accepted Christ as my Savior. Then surely when I lack trust, I am denying what I say I believe. At the same time, I say there is a battle in the universe, and God is God. Then, if I lack trust, what I am really doing is denying in practice that he has a right, as my God, to use me where he wants in the spiritual battle that exists in the seen and the unseen world.The trust and contentment must be in the Christian framework, but in the proper framework the contentment is deeply important. If the contentment goes and the giving of thanks goes, we are not loving God as we should, and proper desire has become coveting against God. This inward area is the first place of loss of true spirituality. The outward is always just a result of it.

Merry Christmas....Happy New Year.....and think higher thoughts.....

-bo