A Christmas Story - The Bell Rang

If you have seen the movie or the play A Christmas Story, you will remember the scene where Ralphie’s friend Schwartz unleashed the triple-dog dare on Flick on the playground. Flick couldn’t stand up to the pressure of such a lofty dare, despite the breach of etiquette, and licked the pole. He found himself stuck by his tongue to the pole on the cold playground. Then the bell rang. All the kids started running back to the school building. As Flick was pleading for them to come back, one of the friends asked, “What are you gonna do?” Ralphie just said, “I don’t know. The bell rang.” And he ran off to leave Flick stuck to the pole.

When Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James, and John, they immediately left what they were doing and followed him. Immediately. They didn’t hesitate. They dropped their work tools and immediately followed Jesus.

Later in his ministry, Jesus encountered three other guys. They came up with excuses to not follow Him despite making comments suggesting that they wanted to follow Him. They just wished following Him was a little more convenient. Jesus replied with three overstatements. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head…Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God… No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:57-62 ESV). He spoke against security, waiting for the perfect situation, and looking back.

Those three had their “buts”, but what is your big “but”? It might be similar to the “buts” of those three men. Are you putting off doing what you know God wants until you are a little more secure in life, whether that is a job, home, or something else? You may be waiting for the finances to be just right in your life to start giving the way God wants you to. In this case, you think you are willing to follow God but His timing is just a little off. You assume, and wrongly so, that the perfect situation to follow Him and take spirituality seriously is something that you can do at some perfect point in the future. Maybe you would like to follow Him, but you just aren’t ready to give up the life that you are currently enjoying.

Your reasons may be completely different than those expressed by the three Jesus encountered. It could be your popularity. Following Jesus would probably cause that to dwindle as you would become a little freakish in almost all areas of your life. It could be the way you entertain yourself. Following Jesus usually does change that. Whatever your excuse is, big “buts” get in the way of us surrendering ourselves to Jesus and living His life in the here and now. Honestly, when we look in the spiritual mirror, we each have big “buts” that we wrestle with. Some bigger than others, but each one is something that needs to be done away with if we are going to have the spiritual body God wants us to have.

The problem is that we cannot be the people that God wants us to be because we don’t have the surrendered heart of the early church. Check out that church in Acts 2:42-47 and Acts 4:32-37 to get a glimpse of how Christians living together the way God intended can really impact their lives and the lives of those around them. When it comes down to it, we aren’t really followers of Jesus; we’re just fans. We like Jesus, but we aren’t ready to surrender our whole life to Him.

We must ask ourselves, “Are we only a fan of Jesus?” He asks for total surrender; he asks for us to immediately follow him; he asks for us to carry our cross, but are we just fans?

Ralphie struggled with indecision. Ralphie said, “I don’t know. The bell rang.” He knew that he should help Flick, but he was stuck in the routine of going back in when the bell rang. His indecision was a decision; indecision is always a decision.

The decision that God wants us to make is to immediately follow Jesus, no matter what the cost. No matter how crazy it seems. Not tomorrow. Today.  Immediately.

What change do you need to make? What thought do you need to wrestle with and discard? Who do you need to forgive? Who do you need to love?

God is in the “now” business. So often we live in the past or the future; however, God wants us to be living the life He designed us to live right now. Living the way He wants us to right now is the only way we can insure that we will be where He wants us to be in the future.

Living in God’s will daily is like having a baby. This time of year we celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus, God coming from heaven and becoming flesh to save the world. But there is the human side of it. For Jesus to come into the world, Mary had to deliver him. I don't know if you have ever had a baby or seen a woman in labor, but when the time is now, it's now.

The time for us to be who God wants us to be is now.

A Christmas Story - Oh, I Hate the Smell of Tapioca

There is this scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie and his brother were visiting Santa at a department store. The Santa is a terrible Santa. He seems to enjoy terrifying the children, is ready to get off the clock, and doesn’t care about spreading any joy. For him, being Santa is just another paycheck.

Ralphie is excited to tell Santa that he wants an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle. He gets nervous, stumbles, and agrees to a football being the gift he wants. But that just isn’t the case, so Ralphie climbs back up the slide to tell Santa what he really wants. Santa replies, “You’ll shoot your eye out kid. Merry Christmas. Hoooo. Hoooo. Hoooo.”

Have you ever been disappointed? Have you ever looked forward to a certain item or trip only for it to be less than you expected? Have you ever been so excited to meet someone and then they just turned out to be a jerk? I would love to hear your story.

Unfortunately, Christians have often been more of a disappointment to the world rather than the blessing they were called to be. Many people hate Christians, and rightfully so. Not because of the message we share but because of the non-Christlike life we live. We have often behaved in ways that aren’t the most loving. And I’m not innocent of being an embarrassment to Jesus at times. We might be too judgmental of others. We may talk about how people that don’t believe in our pet doctrine are going to hell. But the biggest, and a source of the two previous symptoms, problem is that we don’t really love people.

This is sad because John wrote, “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:19-21 ESV).

So the scary news is this. If you aren’t a loving person, then you aren’t right with God. Oh, you could claim that you are. You could know all the right religious things to say. You could go to church every week. You could even read your Bible and pray every day, but for some reason you aren’t growing. It’s like the Santa Claus in A Christmas Story. He had the costume, but he wasn’t spreading any joy.

All too often, Christians – those who should help people see God’s great gift to the world – get in the way and prevent people from seeing Jesus. It’s true that not everyone will respond to the message of the kingdom, but we, as followers of Jesus, are to be people that reflect His glory to everyone around us whether they respond positively or not. When the world is in shambles, we keep a positive, godly perspective. When ends don’t seem like they will meet, we keep up hope. When someone is in need, we search for a way to help. When darkness creeps in, we help shine the light.

Jesus came into this world, as we remember every year at Christmas time, to help renew us from our fallen state into the image of God (Colossians 3:10). It is the greatest gift God could give us. And because of His great, immeasurable love for us, we should respond by passing that love along to others. Christmas is the season of giving, but it shouldn’t just stop there. As Christians, every season should be just that. We are to make a difference in our homes, workplaces, and communities.

A Christmas Story - You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

A Christmas Story was released in 1983 to moderate success. From those humble beginnings, it has become a perennial Christmas movie, a movie so popular that even CC Banks Productions is presenting the play adaptation this Christmas season in Antwerp.

One of the most famous lines in the show is Ralphie being told by his teacher, by his mother, and even by Santa, that he will shoot his eye out if he gets the official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle.

And as we see, the warnings were right. Ralphie heads out to play with his newly received Red Ryder BB gun and on his first shot has the BB rebound off of a tin sign and break his glasses.

I don’t know if you were ever warned not to do something, but desired it so much or were just rebellious enough that you did it anyway. I remember when I was four my parents would let me play outside in the yard. We lived in the country on a farm with many barns. The rule was that I was not to go into the hayloft. One day, while climbing into the hayloft, my hands slipped off of the handle and I fell, whacking my head onto a horse feeder. A concussion and stitches later I realized the err of my young ways.

As adults, we often become too prideful to take the advice of others and avoid things that are harmful for us. We might hear grown-up versions of “You’ll shoot your eye out” or “You can’t go in the hayloft,” but we are talented at ignoring the warnings. For starters, we rephrase them. Things like sexual immorality become casual sex or porn. Pride, the word I used at the beginning of this paragraph, becomes self-esteem and a feeling that we are expected to feel about our homeland if we want to be patriotic. Usury becomes the normal means of the haves helping the have-nots. We imagine appropriate scenarios where murder, which was forbidden, is allowed. And with greed, we don’t even try to morph it. Society has adopted the Gordon Gekko’s moniker from the movie Wall Street that “Greed is good.” We have a difficult time staying away from the sins that God has told us to stay away from. In the many years since the time of Jesus, even before the time of Jesus, humanity has mastered justifying our sinful lifestyles as necessary means to our selfish - although we wouldn’t dare use that word - ends. We have become experts at disguising and justifying our sinful lifestyles, and we, our families, and our society pays the consequence for that mistake. There. I just did it. I used the word mistake rather than sin.

“Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14-15 ESV).

Repent. That just means to turn away from the life you are currently living. You can’t stay on the same course if you are going to repent. The word in the Greek here is metanoeo. It’s the combination of two words. The preposition “meta,” which means “after” or “with,” and the verb “noeo,” which means to “perceive” or “think.” The idea is that our actions will change once we shift our thinking.

On a simple level, it would be learning new information and changing your actions because of it. Many of us travel to Fort Wayne. We have our routes that we take. An unrepentant person would be one who learns of a different way that would save them ten minutes but continues to do it the way they have always done it. A repentant person would be one who changes their course based upon the new information. That might be a light-hearted explanation of repentance, but I hope you get the idea.

During the Christmas season, we are faced with new information. God came to the earth in the form of a little baby. He came for a few major reasons. One was to be the sacrifice for our sins. Another was to transform God’s kingdom. The other was to show us how to live our lives. It is in this latter that he wants to tell us, “You’ll shoot your eye out if you continue to live the life that you are currently living.” God knows what is best for us. He came down to earth to live with all of our vulnerabilities to show us what is best for us. When we believe that He knows and has shown what is best for us, that is the information that should cause us to change. That is the gospel that should bring about repentance. What needs to change in your life as a result of the truth that God knows what is best for us?

If you are looking for a church home this holiday season, I invite you to come join us at Riverside Christian Church. Throughout this month, we will be exploring the themes of A Christmas Story. Sunday, December 14, will be “Oh, I hate the smell of Tapioca.”