Good Monday morning! We didn't have a good weekend of football again: Nebraska fumbled away their chance to play in a big bowl game, and the Broncos lost their game too. Tonight we can watch our local NFL player, Danny Woodhead, as the Patriots play the Jets on Monday Night Football. As the sun rises this morning, take a moment to thank God for the day.
"On a Monday? Ack, 'smatter with you?" you would ask me if given the chance.
Yes, it may be easier to thank God for a Friday if you are on the normal M-F work week, but we should thank the Lord for Monday as well and as energetically as we thank him for a Friday or Saturday. I sense a resistance to this and I haven't even sent out the e-mail yet! Yes, a Monday morning may be more of a prayer for help and strength to God than one of thanksgiving and praise. We do live in a tough world and work is not one of our favorite pastimes. Actually, I suspect that more of us would enjoy the work we are doing if we could do it somewhere other than the corporate environment we happen to be in right now. Do the demands of a new Monday at work make you want to scream out for the Lord's help? What if the Lord sent an angel to you in a dream saying, "Hit the trail, amigo! The Lord wants you to flee this country right now!"
Okay, so the Lord's messengers may not speak in the vernacular, but Joseph received a message like that in today's Christmas story from Matthew.
Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt I called my son." Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old and under, according to the time he had ascertained from the wise men. Matthew 2:13-16
Notice that this is one of the instances in the Bible where an angelic messenger did not start out with something like, "Don't be afraid!" The urgency in this message may have called for Joseph to be afraid, to get him up and running with the baby Jesus and Mary. Joseph did not have time to put in his two weeks notice. Mary couldn't run up to the hill country to say goodbye to Elizabeth. The couple and their baby had to flee that night. Not long before this, the wise men from the east had offered Jesus three valuable, and easily transportable, gifts. Joseph would have had little trouble in grabbing those gifts, a few clothes, a little food, and to use the biblical, getting thee hence right quick!
This Christmas story doesn't sound like a very king-like action to take. We want all those heavenly hosts in the area to go whack Herod upside the head, but the little family had to flee to a foreign land. God may call us to do something that just doesn't seem right from our point of view. We might be afraid to be viewed as weak or cowardly. Flee in the middle of the night? Isn't that what criminals do? What about sending Joseph a job offer he couldn't refuse down in Egypt? God could have done something like that to get Joseph moving in the right direction. We don't always know why God does things a certain way, but we do know that to have faith is to trust God to do what is best from His point of view. We also know that not one of us would want to be in Herod's trembling shoes on Judgement Day! Tried to murder the Son of God by killing a bunch of children... oh dear!
Have a merry Christmas!
Bucky
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