Exhortation, First Sunday After Christmas

God is unchanging. The calendar changes, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We have trouble thinking about the same thing for ten minutes, but “the Glory of Israel . . . is not a man that He should change His mind.” Our plans shift rapidly from one thing to another, but “The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation.”

Human beings, unlike God, are utterly dependent creatures, created from nothing, and therefore constantly changing. You are not intellectually or spiritually the same person you were last year, or yesterday. You don’t even stay physically the same from day to day. Flakes of your skin are always coming off, so that you get a brand new skin about every 30 days.

The world around us is constantly in motion, and the late modern world moves more quickly than most. In what one writer has called “liquid modern society,” everything is “commodified.” A commodity is an object that “loses [its] usefulness . . . in the course of being used.” A Styrofoam coffee cup is a commodity; your great-grandmother’s tea set is not. In liquid modernity, we are tempted to treat everything as disposable. Everything – plastic forks, sour cream, styles, friends, and spouses –has an implicit “use by” date.

We are changing beings in a changing world, and the only stability we have comes from outside ourselves. Jesus said that a man who builds his life on the rock of His teaching will stand in the face of storms, but a man who tries to build on his own insights is building on sand. Paul prays that the Ephesians would be strengthened by the Spirit so that Christ will dwell in them and that they all would be “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17), and the love in which we are rooted is the love of God in Christ. Our stability does not come from ourselves, but from God’s hold on us.

In our world, staying still is not a high priority. But in a world of commodities, being rooted and stable is a radical stance. In a world of whirl, standing still is the true mark of the cutting-edge counter-culture.