The Sylvr Pen

[Good to read: Mt 14:13-21 and Mt 15:22-38]

What do you want for Christmas this year? Will some Bread crumbs do?

When did we start asking that first question, thus promoting the present gimme-gimme focus on earthly wishes and cravings rather than on the King of creation visiting tiny humanity to give us what we really need: deliverance from our gimme-gimme attitude?

It’s gotten really bad in 21st century America in general and just as bad in “the church in America.”  We think we’ve got it coming: life on a silver platter, served with elaborate garnishes, just like the religious elite of Jesus’ earthly time (Luk 11:43). But one woman then (Mt 15:22)—not the least bit acceptable in the eyes of their clique (Mk 7:26)—saw enormous potential in “Bread crumbs” (Mk 7:28)—one humble but faith-filled woman whose story Matthew sandwiches right between the two accounts of Christ feeding thousands with very little bread and collecting the leftover fragments afterwards—enough to fill twelve baskets (Mt 14:20) the one time and seven (large ones) the other (Mt 15:37)—amazing leftovers!

But that woman’s words are no less amazing. How come she understood what the scribes and religious know-it-alls didn’t? For just as astounding as her positive words are the negative words of those traditionalists who, after Christ had just done the food miracles, demanded from Him a sign (Mt 16:1) that He was Who He claimed to be—a sign like Moses giving the people manna from Heaven (John 6:30-31)!

Jesus told them (as well as His followers) He was the manna come down from heaven (John 6:32-35). And weren’t those multitude feedings and leftover gatherings great enough signs? Would any signs have been enough? What was wrong with these people?

Their traditions (Mt 15:3-6). Their pride. Their greed. Their sense that they deserved special treatment and the best of the goods.

With that in mind, I can see Jesus’ conversation with the Canaanite woman in a whole different Light. The lesson for us to learn lies in her words.

I always wondered why Jesus talked to her in the demeaning way He did. Now I realize that He, knowing every word she would speak beforehand (Ps 139:4) wanted this exchange to take place to demonstrate the enormous potential in an attitude of personal humility coupled with complete confidence in God.

She didn’t need the full, freshly baked loaves. A couple of crumbs from the Bread of Life, cast off by those rejecting Him, would provide all the power necessary to deliver her daughter from a demon. Only a brushed off “crumb” herself in the eyes of the prideful traditionalists, lacking what they considered proper credentials for God’s blessing, yet her understanding of Christ’s capabilities surpassed theirs by light years! Christ made his comments about the little dogs, I believe, solely for the purpose of her significant reply.

She got it! She had it! Those pampered politicians of the religious sector didn’t. And as Jesus said in the parable of the talents (“He that has not, even what he has will be taken away”-Mt 25:29-30), Isaiah said centuries before about bread and prideful hypocrites: that God would take away from them the bread (Is 3:1)!

What God gives is enough—if we will just see God in it! And what He gave in Christ He still gives via His Holy Spirit. So, what do you want for Christmas this year? How about some of that precious Bread of Life come down from heaven? Even the crumbs that get brushed from the hypocrites’ tables, rejected, are packed with powerful potential for the abundant life.

“The people who walked in darkness Have seen a great light; Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, Upon them a light has shined” (Is 9:2). ————————————–    “Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life'” (Jhn 8:12). ————————————- “For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light we see light” (Ps 36:9).

Someone around here’s been passing off counterfeit money, and getting away with it till now. Holiday busyness has so distracted clerks in stores—and even banks—that they’ve failed to look closely at the paper bills others handed them. But now, after getting bilked, or hearing of someone else who did, they’re checking their currency carefully.

And how do they do that? By holding the bills up to the light. Some things about authentic currency you can’t see any other way.

Likewise, we can only see the greatest truths of scripture by the light of Christ’s Spirit.

Jesus came as a newborn human two millennia ago so that we might have His light. When He later walked the earth as a man, He fulfilled the Isaiah scripture above, as Matthew 4:14-16 declares. Still later, as He prepared His disciples for His departure to the Father, He told them He would send the Holy Spirit, who would guide them into all truth (Jhn 16:7,13). Only by His light do we see the light we need from His word.

What a wonder it was to me when I experienced this phenomenon as a new believer, many years ago! Scripture passages I’d read before took on new and fuller meaning than they’d ever had when I’d read them with just human intellectual understanding.  Some broke through so much like sun streams through cloudbanks that I found myself uttering, “Oh! So that’s what that means!”

I hope you have the light of Christ within you, enabling you to see the truths not evident any other way. If you aren’t sure you do, turn to Him and ask for that light of His, in His Holy Spirit, right now (Lk 11:9-13).

May the many sparkling holiday lights we see this year remind us of the Light of Life found only in Christ Jesus, and may they stir our gratitude to God for this marvelous gift to us!

Do you know what “Bethlehem” signifies in Hebrew? Its meaning, “House of Bread,” connects remarkably with Jesus being placed in a manger there…

My favorite Christmas decoration of all we ever put on display here at “the farm” was one my husband set up and spotlighted beside the driveway: a manger with a cross just behind it. To me, its imagery spoke so clearly of the reason Baby Jesus came to earth to be laid in a manger: someday later, to be laid on a cross and bear the penalty for our sins.

But there’s also specific reason for a manger to be His infant resting place. That came across to me in a quirkier way…

After a couple of Christmastimes of the cross-and-manger holding its location by the drive, my husband moved it to the pasture, where our real, flesh-and-wool sheep grazed. He thought that setting was more natural and fitting. But the sheep kept eating the hay that lined the manger and jumping into it to snuggle down there.

Well, who can blame them? A manger is, after all, a feeding trough for sheep—and a good spot for warmth and comfort amid this world’s coldness.

Yes. It is. And the LORD often spoke of His people, in both Old and New Testaments, as His sheep. Jesus referred to Himself as the good Shepherd and His true followers as His flock.

He also spoke of Himself as “…the bread of life,” “the bread come down from heaven,” and promised, “He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.” He even told the people to feed on Him!

He made these statements just after miraculously feeding thousands in the wilderness from a handful of small bread loaves. He was talking about something beyond physical bread and physical life. But most of the people, unable to think beyond the material world, didn’t get it. So when he started telling them they needed to feast upon Him, they were scandalized.

I hope you know what it means to feast upon Jesus, upon all that He is.

Those crowds in the wilderness were most concerned about feeding their physical bodies, but Jesus’ words in John 6:27 echo Isaiah 55:2’s warning to labor instead for “bread”  that “endures to eternal life.”

During this Christmas season, when human minds dwell much on earthly food, may we act more like the flock of Christ’s sheepfold than the folks who sought him in the wilderness for mere material blessing. Let us “eat what is good, and let [our] soul[s] delight…in abundance”—by feasting our hearts on the Bread of Life, Who was placed, one ancient season, in a feeding trough in Bethlehem, “The House of Bread.”

“God with us.” That’s what Immanuel means. How much does that mean to you? It’s come to mean everything to me. Not only did Christ come to dwell bodily on planet earth in human form for a short fragment of eternity. When He left, He sent His Spirit, by which He promised His disciples, “Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the age [/world].” He is here with us who believe, even now, every minute: as Counselor, Helper, Shepherd, Comforter, and more.

This is not a fantasy dreamed up for people to have “an imaginary friend.” I have experienced the evidence of His presence in too many ways even for a fat book to contain, and I intend to tell about some of them on this website in time to come.

Yes, I know it’s true. I just get bowled over trying to comprehend it. I guess it’s not my job to try to comprehend it, only revel in it—allow the truth of it to fill me to the full and overflow in humble, joyous praise.

When I consider Your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of Him, the son of man that you visit him? -Psalm 8:3-4, NKJV

That verse has been much on my mind of late–especially after seeing pictures taken from the Hubble space telescope and hearing the calculated size, distance, and heat intensity of various stars and black holes. We are so small. Our earth is so small. Even our sun is but a dust speck too small to be visible amid the galaxies. Yet God the Creator of all this has visited us–even bodily, in Christ’s incarnation: in the same tiny physical form He gave us, even through the whole process of human life from physical birth to physical death.

Amazing beyond comprehension.

But the God and Creator of the vast is also the God and Creator of the infinitesimally small. The more powerful we make our microscopes as well as our telescopes, the more mind-blowing the intricacies we see, in a cell, in a molecule, in an atom. And what beyond that, smaller yet, can we still not see?

I need to remember the LORD as the God of the small things as well as the God of the enormous. The enormous is important, because it puts me in my rightful place and helps make me glaringly aware of my relative insignificance in the grand workings of the Universe, my helplessness and weakness in the face of God’s overwhelming power. But I also need to see how much careful consideration and concern He gives to the tiniest of details within His giant realm—details so small I can’t even see them with a microscope’s aid. I need also to reflect on how, amazingly, He has involved Himself in the petty concerns of my little life, and on all the evidence I have of His intervening in it. I need to savor the truth that in the greatness of His wisdom and power, which extends in all directions toward both the vast and the miniscule, He sent me a Savior, and Counsellor, and Helper, in the shell of a human infant form. When I do, it sometimes doubles me over with gratitude and awe.

[For an awe-inspiring look at things I’ve been talking about, watch the whole series of Louie Giglio’s “How Great is Our God” presentation, on You Tube, starting with Part One here.]