The God Who Saves

Once again, the Christmas season is upon us.    We had another year of COVID 19 followed by federal vaccine mandates that threaten jobs, supply chain shortages, people leaving employment without new jobs, international unrest, crime waves in major cities, and a host of other issues.  We are told that the the newest COVID 19 variant will be far worse than everything that has come before.

And yet...there is hope--much more hope than there was last year at this same moment. Last year when I wrote this post, I was discouraged because I had forgotten my own admonitions.  Our hope is not a political party or a political leader or even in our fellow citizens. Our hope cannot be for more favorable elections or better laws.  Whenever our hope is in any of those things, it is always misplaced.  As Paul said in his epistle to Timothy (4:10) "our hope is in the living God who died for all and particularly for those who have accepted His salvation."

Here in Texas. there are beautiful light displays everywhere and families, now mostly unmasked, are gathering to enjoy the festivities   Still, I cannot help but wonder how many of these families are out just to see something beautiful at the end of another long and tiresome year.  Even most of those who grew up in church no longer apply Christianity to their lives in any meaningful way--they may talk to their children about the birth of baby Jesus on Christmas day, but they don't really apply His teachings to their lives.  Christmas celebrations are really an interesting comment on a society that is surrounded by Christmas from before Thanksgiving until January 2 but that has forgotten the meaning behind the celebration.

The story of Christmas is not the story of a refugee family fleeing Palestine, nor is it the story of a struggling single mother.  The Christmas story is the story of how God fulfilled His promise to save a fallen world by being born as a human, living among us, and dying on a cross.  Without Easter, Christmas has no meaning and without Christmas, Easter has no victory.

As we look into 2022, rather than focusing on what laws are passed and what new COVID variants are waiting around the corner, we need to refocus on the One who came into a dark world that was completely without hope and brought light into that darkness.  His power is eternal; it does not waiver in the face of illness or political wrangling.  

The story of Christmas teaches of us that no situation is too dark for God's love and that our hope can never be in a human being--our hope is only in God.  The Psalmist tells us that salvation belongs to God (Psalm 3:8).  Salvation is proprietary--He owns it.  If we don't find it in Him, we don't find it all.

Christmas reminds us that salvation is not far away or out of reach.  Christmas reminds us that God so loved the world that He came to live as one of us.  The name Jesus, Yeshua, is the Hebrew word for salvation.  It is in this name that God has revealed Himself as the savior of the world.  If we don't experience salvation through Jesus, we don't find it all.

I invite each of you this Christmas to experience the God who saves.  He is strong enough to deliver you out of whatever circumstances you are facing.  And He is the only hope for this lost and fallen world.

Merry Christmas.

Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her holiday series, Kinsman, is available in paperback and on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

 

The Freedom Prayer

 I originally wrote this nine years ago for The Planner.  It is much more timely now than it was then.  May God have mercy on America.

“Lord we come to You tonight to ask for Your forgiveness. The Bible promises that when we seek You, we will find You, if we search with all our hearts.

"Lord we confess that we have not followed Your commands. We have not loved You with our whole hearts--we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not stood for the truth of Your Gospel. We have sat by and said nothing when Your name was blasphemed and mocked. We did not take a stand when we saw Your laws despised.

“We know that many times we ourselves have been among the worst offenders. We have lived sinful lives that are contrary to the word of God. Like Esau, we have traded away our birthright for a little convenience; we have despised this incredible gift of freedom that You provided for us and allowed all of the liberty that our country offered to be trampled down. We have forgotten the words of King David who said that it is better to fall into the hands of God than to be at the mercy of men, and so we now find ourselves living under the rule of a cruel and despotic government who has stolen everything from us and shows us no mercy.

“We know that everything that is happening to us is a result of our bad choices, both individually and as a nation. You gave us the gift of being born into a free nation—the greatest nation the world has ever seen. You gave us a form of government unlike any other that had ever been known by any other people, and we did not value it enough to defend it.

“For all of these things, Lord, we ask Your forgiveness. We pray tonight that You will change our hearts so that each of us will begin to love what You love, to hate what You hate and to want what You want. We ask You to save our nation, for we know that the Bible teaches that salvation belongs to our God—no political party, no ideology, no government can save us. If we don’t find salvation in You, we won’t find it at all.

“Please turn Your face to us again, and give us back our freedom, and restore our country so that we can truly be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We ask all these things in the name of Your son, Jesus. Amen.”

Alexandra Swann's novel W: The Set, incorporates her novels The Planner and The Chosen which tell the story of  an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21 and NDAA.  The set is available on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.

Search and Rescue

 For the Son of Man has come to seek and save that which was lost”  Luke 19:10 KJV   There were so many hopes for 2020 and the start of a new decade, but instead we had a year with a host of problems.  For most it was a terrible year, for others, in spite of all of the challenges, it was one of the best of their lives.  But it surely was not what anyone expected.  

Now we are two weeks into 2021 and still waiting to see what challenges and opportunities this year will bring.  Will we face more lockdowns?  Will life get more or less back to normal? What will the new administration do that will affect us?   Many of us will make resolutions to change some aspect of our behavior in.  We may want to lose weight, or get in better physical condition or to get promoted at work or develop better personal relationships, but for most of us when night falls on 2020, most of those resolutions will still be unfulfilled, shuffled forward to another year as we continue in a never-ending desire to become a better us.

Last fall we released our fourth installment of our Kinsman series--The Land of the Blind.  Like the rest of the series, the fourth book follows characters who need to be rescued--either from the consequences of their own actions or the actions of others.  I smile when I read reviews of the first three books saying that the books make them wish that "something like this could happen in real life."

We just finished celebrating Christmas, and we looked at nativities and sang songs of the child in the manger, but Christmas is so much more than a sweet story about a little baby who was born in a stable.  The cave in which Jesus was born is symbolic of the tomb where He was laid after His crucifixion, and the swaddling clothes in which His parents wrapped him represent the grave cloths.  He did not come to earth to be a good man or a good teacher—He was born to die for us in the greatest search and rescue operation of all time.  The God of the universe looked down and saw our lonely, lost, dysfunctional world—a world which we were powerless to change—and loved us so much that He sent His only Son to save us. Jesus is our Kinsman Redeemer who came to release our debt, and He extends to each of us the greatest invitation we will ever be offered. But for His invitation to impact us, we must recognize the immense opportunity which we have been offered; then we must be willing to accept it for ourselves and fully embrace our new life.  And we have to understand that as we accept the invitation for ourselves, we take on both the ability and the responsibility to impact and change the lives of others.

In the books, the invitations extended to the recipients warn that if the individual fails to respond no later than "precisely at midnight" the invitation will be considered to have been declined and "no further invitations will be extended."  In reality, God extends His priceless invitation to give us forgiveness, a new start and a new life repeatedly throughout our lifetimes, but, if we refuse to accept it, there is finally a day for all of us when the invitation is considered declined and no future invitations are available. 

As we start the New Year, I invite each of you to see 2021  as more than an opportunity for a new resolution and as more than a decade promising new vision.  This year--and this decade--can be a time for a rescue—a moment for salvation and a new life.  Accept God’s invitation to you in 2021. “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

 

Alexandra and Joyce Swann's  fourth installment in the Kinsman Series, The Land of the Blind was released November of 2020  For more information, visit their website at http://www.frontier2000.net.