Jan
2
2013
Packed Away
Posted in Salvation 2 Comments
The Christmas decorations are all packed away.
Packed away until next year…if God allows.
The house has been decorated since the day after Thanksgiving.
Even though the tree was watered faithfully, it still dropped a lot of needles.
I know it is inevitable that the externals of Christmas get packed away.
I am mindful of the fact that the internals of Christmas are ongoing.
They are alive and well in the heart of every believer in Jesus Christ.
Alive because HE is alive in their heart.
The calendar does not have to be a certain date for Christmas to exude in our homes.
For 365 days, that spirit…His Spirit…is present in the heart of a believer.
In essence, every day is Christmas.
C.S. Lewis wrote the antithesis.
In his book, The Lion,The Witch And The Wardrobe, Mr. Tumnus, a Faun, invites Lucy Pevensie to his house for tea.
He is quite upset that he is “in the pay of the White Witch”.
The White Witch rules over Narnia and told him that if he ever saw a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve in Narnia, he was to catch them and hand them over to her.
That is what the Faun was in the process of doing, when he spotted Lucy in the woods.
He was regretting this from the moment he began to talk to her.
He was having a change of heart.
As Mr. Tumnus described the White Witch to Lucy, he said, “Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb. It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”
Think of that!
Can you imagine?
Always winter and never Christmas.
Christmas always packed away…safe in boxes…in the attic.
That is what it is like in the heart of a person who does not know Jesus.
Think about the coldness.
The heart that is frozen solid.
The heart that is hard as stone.
I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them: I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow My decrees and be careful to keep My laws. They will be My people, and I will be their God.
(Ezekiel 11:19,20)
Without the Spirit moving in us…giving us the faith to believe, our heart is cold.
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)
In Lewis’ book, if the White Witch was angry, she turned her subjects to stone.
Stone statues.
Lewis had a Christ-figure in his story…a lion named Aslan.
Aslan explained to Susan, Lucy’s sister, “It means…that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic. there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”
The Gospel is so evident in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe.
Aslan, the innocent, was killed in a traitor’s stead.
The traitor was Edmund, Lucy’s brother.
Aslan agreed to exchange his own life for the life of Edmund.
The innocent for the guilty.
The White Witch’s castle was filled with her enemies.
They were all stone statues.
Aslan breathed on them.
The statues came to life.
It is no different with us.
We are stone…we are indifferent…we are wintered.
The Spirit breathes…we come alive…we are “Christmas-ed”.
In Christ, it is always Christmas…and never winter.
In Christ, we are made alive by the breath of His Spirit.
No more stone statues.
If we look…really look…everywhere the statues are coming to life.
Alive.
Breathing.
Christmas-ed.
Praise Him…the innocent…His life in exchange for ours.
The innocent for the guilty.
Easter-ed.
I recently read the Chronicles of Narnia which I had never read before! I loved them!!! I was sorry to see the end of the last book! Great analogy!
Janna,
The Chronicles of Narnia were wonderful read aloud books when my children were growing up. We all loved them as well.
Gina