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Hey there, Beloved… Caution. Don’t glance too quickly at the manger. There’s a good chance you’ll see the wrong Jesus. Oh, he’s in there for sure…the little baby in swaddling clothes, just like you expected. But please don’t see him. You’ll likely mistake him for who he really is. Confused? Let’s talk in Deeper Thoughts below.
But first… four great things going on: · Teens: We’re going to try this again as the weather bumped us last Sunday…Youth Group Christmas Celebration THIS Sunday, 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Pizza, connection, plus fun & games! · Christmas Eve is Wednesday! Join us for one of two identical candlelight services on December 24—5:00 p.m. or 6:30 p.m. Invite your friends and family to a beautiful celebration of Jesus and presentation of the Gospel. Our service will be a tight one hour in length to make it navigable for your unchurched family and friends. o Parents: Nursery childcare will be available at 5:00 p.m. only; for preschool and older, please bring them into service for a wonderful Christmas experience. o Interested in singing in the choir? Click here to contact Ryan Sauder! · Please help me!! If you’re one of the 100 Mt. Hope’rs who have yet to do so (gulp!)… help!! Click here to take a super-quick but important anonymous survey to help us understand how God is working through Mt. Hope’s content and experiences, what we could do better, what we could stop doing, and what you perceive are your greatest needs. This survey will be invaluable to helping us (and me in particular) shape our plans for the winter season and beyond! · This week’s “Daily Six” continues our super-special six minutes each morning in the Word of God, Monday through Friday, on our Daily Six webpage as we focus on some “Best of The Daily Six,” looking back on content from years ago that still inspires where we are in our spiritual growth today. If you’d like to receive daily email reminders and you’re not already getting them, click here to sign up! OK…that’s it for you email skimmers and you who dislike manger scenes anyway. BUT… Some Deeper Thoughts… Honesty moment: I’m not super fond of teaching on Christmas. [Insert gasp here… “Oh, Pastor! The scandal!!”] Here’s the deal: The Jesus of Christmas is very predictable. He is cute, I’ll give you that. A precious little baby, constantly smiling in every manger scene I’ve observed (moms, c’mon… is that realistic?). Everyone around him is glowing with adoration, arms raised in an exclamation of joy. The shepherds, wise men, angels, and even the donkeys are having their best day ever. But when we look at the manger, when we talk about baby Jesus, when we sing the lovely Christmas carols, does anyone learn anything new? Are we gripped with conviction? Can we feel ourselves profoundly changing right before our very eyes? Is our faith reshaped and emboldened? Does everyone in attendance at church really want to be there? Or are we often just going through the motions--as pleasant and lovely as they genuinely are—regaling ourselves once more with the precious story of the birth of our Savior… who as a baby is, well, kind of adorable? I wonder in all those familiar motions—the carols, the candles, the donkeys, angels, and baby—if we miss something that should be radically transformative to our lives. We miss the Jesus who is absolutely worth giving up everything we possess to gain, and who asks us for precisely that. If what we see the Sunday before Christmas and on Christmas Eve is just the baby Jesus in the manger—and not the Jesus of the resurrection, the Jesus of fierceness and fire, the Jesus returning on his white horse to recapture his bride from the devil’s grip—we are missing Jesus. This baby in a manger was cute and cuddly for a moment. He was profoundly a demonstration of the limitless love of God (Samuel Sierra rocked a teaching on this last Sunday!), that God would stoop down to the lowliest point in the universe and take on the form of an infant who needed to learn how to walk, talk, use the bathroom, tie his shoes (sandals), and eat on his own. Philippians 2:5-11 reveals this so magnificently. But Jesus wasn’t the baby in the manger for long. He grew up. And then he became the Jesus of fire. Here’s how his cousin John revealed it: “One more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am unworthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Luke 3:16). Oh, friends, when we only see the manger Jesus, we miss Jesus. The real and full and fire-filled Jesus—God boldly, powerfully, transformatively in the flesh, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball with the whole of our life. This Jesus speaks a powerful word that burns away the dross, the brokenness, the sinfulness in our lives. This Jesus unmistakably reveals God’s love. This Jesus hands us a life of radical purpose. This Jesus calls us to repentance, to give up our lives for him and his mission, to love and serve the Lord with everything we have. Hebrews 12:1-2 tells us to lock eyes with him. Fiercely, passionately, intently gaze into who he is and take every step in our lives with precision along the race he has marked out for us. “…let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2). Bam. Did you see it? He sits in the seat of eternal, supernatural power. His eyes flame with the fire of limitless love. His words pierce the innermost parts of our soul. His healing changes everything about us. This isn’t the cuddly baby in the manger. This is the resurrected Lord of the Universe. Friends, let’s meet to worship God and fix our eyes on this Savior! He is why the angels exploded with joy at his birth. They saw what was coming. It was way bigger than a baby. C’mon out… no snow this Sunday. 10:00 a.m… bring your Bibles and a pen! God’s Word to us will be good. So good. Much love to you all… Chris Eads Mt. Hope Pastor Friend
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Hey friends… Let’s move quickly. I have seven things I need to tell you. Can I stick with that?? We’ll see. But then I do have some Deeper Thoughts below for an eighth…
Ready? Here goes: · THIS Sunday is our Annual Mt. Hope Christmas Party, 5:00 – 7:30 p.m. Our Kids Connect and teens will lead us through the story of Christmas in a short and fun Christmas Pageant… BUT THEN… let’s all connect around a potluck Christmas dinner for rich fellowship with the whole church family! Click here to sign up for the potluck and bring some yummy treats! o Parents: TOMORROW (Saturday) is our final full rehearsal for the pageant, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. o Teens: No Youth Group this Sunday. For those helping with the pageant, rehearsal Saturday, 10:00 – 12:00 p.m. and arrival time on Sunday afternoon is 3:45 p.m. · Christmas Eve is coming! Two identical candlelight services on Wednesday, December 24 will give you options to invite your friends and family to a wonderful celebration of Jesus and presentation of the Gospel. 5:00 and 6:30 p.m. Interested in singing in the choir? Click here to contact Ryan Sauder! · Can you personally help me for five minutes? Click here to take a super-quick anonymous survey to help us understand how God is working through Mt. Hope’s content and experiences, what we could do better, what we could stop doing, and what you perceive are your greatest needs. This survey will be invaluable to helping us (and me in particular) shape our plans for the winter season… more on that in Deeper Thoughts below · Ladies: December Tea and Cookie celebration, NEXT Saturday, December 13 from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. at the church. Join us for food, fellowship, games and fun as we celebrate the Christmas season. Click here for more info and to RSVP! · Did we miss the first Sunday of Advent? Yep. Sure did. Total biff. Last Sunday began the advent season, and somehow your theologically well-trained, biblically passionate, lover of Jesus, and usually intelligent pastor simply forgot to arrange for our traditional advent candle lighting and reflection this past Sunday morning. And while the Kingdom of God will certainly go on, let’s pick it up this Sunday and celebrate the coming Messiah! · This week’s “Daily Six” continues our super-special six minutes each morning in the Word of God, Monday through Wednesday, on our YouTube channel as we focus on some “Best of The Daily Six,” looking back on content from years ago that still inspires where we are in our spiritual growth today. If you’d like to receive daily email reminders and you’re not already getting them, click here to sign up! · Sherri and I want to thank you all SO much for the outpouring of love, appreciation, thoughts, and generous expressions of your care over this last month. We truly cherish our connection with you and are so grateful for how well you express that to us! OK…that’s it today for you email skimmers and you who’ve had enough of my seven thoughts and can’t stomach an eighth. BUT… Some Deeper Thoughts: It is time to refocus some things. It’s natural for us to leverage the new year to make fresh commitments, promise ourselves we’ll do better at some things, and then make resolutions that we honestly have no real plans to keep. I never make New Year’s resolutions for just that reason, and I’m not going to start now. But regardless of what time of year it is, I do feel a strong conviction from the Lord--and have been feeling this for quite some time—that an intentional adjustment to our focus at Mt. Hope Church is coming. For the last many weeks, our Elder Team meetings have been filled with this conviction. My prayer times with the Lord have been gripped with the Holy Spirit’s pressing. There has been what ancients used to call “a holy discontent” stirring in my gut. Here it is: We need to refocus our efforts on discipleship. Ugh. That’s a churchy word, isn’t it? Every church that has ever existed has used that phrase (sometimes quite boringly) to describe a wide range of activities, classes, events, catechisms, and programs. But most Christians I know, if we asked them what discipleship is, would give a half-hearted if not entirely inaccurate description of it. Discipleship is not a class. It is not a notebook. It is not a small group meeting. It is not a lecture series. It is not six minutes on YouTube, and it is not even six minutes more. Discipleship is not a Sunday sermon, a worship night, a volunteer program, or serving at a soup kitchen. Discipleship is not a list of twelve doctrines to know. It is not an event that can be completed. It is not a box that can be checked. It is not a program you graduate from and there is no diploma to be given. Discipleship is… well… being a disciple—a word we don’t use outside of churchy settings, and thus it has lost all its power to define for us what it means. A “disciple” is a historic idea from a culture long since passed. In fact, the concept really only existed for about 1,000 years as a societal norm in the ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish cultures from roughly 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. Jesus lived about halfway through this millennia-long societal construct where people fiercely committed themselves to closely following a master (in our modern language a “mentor”) to gain command over a particular discipline—political theory, philosophy, religion, a trade, profession, or some specific intellectual pursuit. Rigid structures of constant togetherness with the teacher fostered an irreversible transfer of wisdom, skill, and experiences where at the end of the discipleship journey the disciple had become a carbon copy of the master, ready to disciple someone else. Jesus didn’t create the idea of discipleship. It was the way intensive education worked in his society. Every religion of his day had a discipleship model. So did all the politicians. And the academics. And the blue-collar tradesmen. And the financial moguls. Jesus simply leveraged the model of his society to transfer the entire essence of his life to twelve men he selected to become carbon copies of his identity. And then he told them to go into all the world and make more… make more disciples out of everyone (see Matthew 28:19). So, the Church today hangs onto the buzz word, even though its cultural meaning and structure has slipped into the shadows of history more than 1,000 years ago. And because it is not our common way of growth and learning today, we have no idea what it means. We say we are disciples of Jesus, but what that means and how we do it is nothing at all like what Jesus meant. So, we need to refocus. I do not know what that will look like, and I do not have a new program to announce. I’m calling on you to join me and the Elders of Mt. Hope to fervently pray that God reveals to us all how to be disciples in 2026… the way that Jesus meant. I’ve asked you to give me five minutes to take a survey (click here) that you’ll find is entitled “Mt. Hope Discipleship Focus Survey.” This is not the endgame of our refocus, as you’ll see what we are asking about is all the traditional stuff that every church calls “discipleship”—the content, classes, groups, sermons, and programs we are used to. But the survey will provide a tiny bit of valuable information for us to measure those traditional tools and their usefulness to us as we contemplate the bigger picture of what this refocus is leading us to. My call to you is more than a five-minute survey. It is a call to prayer. Would you begin to seek the Lord along with us to discover His blueprint for what this means for us today?? Then… let’s meet! 10:00 a.m. Sunday… bring your Bibles and a pen! God’s Word to us will be good. So good. Much love to you all… Chris Eads Mt. Hope Pastor Friend |
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Jesus said, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, & with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” - Matt. 22:37-39
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Ashburn, VA 20148
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