The Christmas story is a story about a king and full of kings who have opinions about this newborn king.  We commonly sing about the Magi who visit Jesus as the “3 Kings” or “3 Wisemen.”  They come to visit Jesus with a set of unusual gifts.  We also cannot forget the evil King Herod who seeks to kill the newborn baby Jesus.  There’s also a third king that we less often talk about, but is mentioned and that is Caesar, who rules even over Herod.  The implications for the birth of Jesus, the newborn King, can be seen in the lives of these kings in the Christmas story.  The kings force us to ask ourselves who do we worship… who is our king?

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Every year as we decorate the house to celebrate the Christmas season, we make sure to get our non-Christmas decoration out on the mantle.  We put up our Christmas tree filled with ornaments, hang our stockings, put out the Christmas kitchen towels, and set the menorah up on the mantle.  I’m not Jewish.  I have never been Jewish, but I love to celebrate Hanukkah during the holiday season.  Why?  Simple, because Jesus celebrated Hanukkah.

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As Christmas approaches, it will become more frequent that hear the recurring debate regarding the political correctness of the phrase “Merry Christmas.”  In the midst of fighting against replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” there also seems to opposition to using abbreviations such as X-Mas or Xmas.  Many people seemingly fear that abbreviating the word Christmas is simply another secular plan devised to remove Christ from Christmas.

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Have you ever waited for something with great anticipation?  When I gave Jessica her anniversary present, I was counting down the days before I could reveal her gift.  I can think back to the evenings before the next iPhone releases that I could hardly sleep because I was anticipating the new iPhone.  As I kid, I can remember the anticipation that would come the night before Christmas.  Advent is a season of waiting and anticipation.  For many years churches throughout the world have created certain rhythms each year that bring us back and re-focus us on the importance of the current season.

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I loved this post by Matt Popovits regarding “The Evidence for God.”  He does an incredible job laying out four basic ways that God reveals himself to man and brings up some interesting thoughts on Agnosticism, Atheism, and Christianity.

“When you choose to see it, evidence of God is everywhere. And what I’ve found is that in the face of such evidence most skeptics, who claim they can’t know if God is real, choose to live as if they’re certain He isn’t. Though they might label themselves as agnostic they live like an atheist, not praying, not worshipping, not reading the Scriptures, not even attempting to find Him or connect with Him.”

Matt’s blog is one of my favorite that I read, so you should be sure to subscribe to it and follow his thoughts; you won’t be dissapointed.

An individual lego piece doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.  A single block really has very little value.  You can’t build anything with one piece and there are very few, if any, ideas of how you could creatively do something special with a single block.  But this single block changes when all of the sudden you begin adding other blocks into the picture.  A single block when combined with hundreds of other single blocks has virtually an unlimited amount of possibilities.  The single block could be used as a piece of a rocket ship, a race car, or something completely different.  Individually the impact of a single piece of lego is very small, but combined with many other pieces the impact has massive potential.

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In order to seriously talk about any theology, we need to make clear what presuppositions we are bringing with us into the discussion.  We can talk for hours about the doctrine of the Trinity, but if I believe that the Bible is God’s word and you do not, we need to talk about something other than the doctrine of the Trinity.  Since I often use this blog for theological musings, I think it’s helpful for me to make clear three presuppositions that I have as I talk about the Bible.

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