All I Want for Christmas: Simeon’s Hope

I’ve always thought that the account of Simeon in Luke 2:21-35 is a very precious and moving story.  I’ve read it and been stirred by it at all times of the year.  But of course, it’s particularly striking around Christmas.

Simeon was an elderly man who had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he wouldn’t die until he had seen the promised Messiah, “the consolation of Israel” (2:25).  We don’t know exactly when or how the Holy Spirit told him this, but we know that he believed it.  He believed it and he waited, with great anticipation.  I imagine a frail but bright-eyed old man who was ready to die in every way, except for one thing: he longed to see the promised king of Israel who would deliver his people.

There is something warm and wonderful about elderly people whose souls are aflame with some undying hope.  There is something precious about a white-haired Jewish man with weathered skin and an arched back who still has a glow in his eyes because he knows that the last thing he will see on earth is the fulfillment of God’s greatest promise.  Cindi and I have often talked about this shared observation: people seem to grow old in only one of two directions — sweet or bitter; soft or hard; pleasant or cranky.  You get the sense that Simeon had grown old very sweetly and had never ceased to seek the Lord and to cling tenaciously to the priceless promise that one day God would put the hope of the world right before his eyes.

This year I’ve been particularly struck by the way Luke describes Simeon.  He simply says, “This man was righteous and devout” (2:25).  But what made him “righteous and devout”?  What did his righteousness and his devotion consist of?  How was it expressed?  Luke makes it clear grammatically: “This man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel.

There is no such thing as righteousness devoid of Christ-centered anticipation; no such thing as devotion that lacks Christ-embracing hope.  Biblical holiness is not just performing the right duties and using the right words and knowing the right doctrine.  Biblical holiness means having a hope-driven heart like Simeon’s.  It means channeling the entirety of your desire and your longing and your anticipation toward the glorious Savior of the world whose redemption has surged into the world and flooded us with grace as far as the curse is found.  It means so looking forward to the coming of Christ that you really can be described with one main action word, like Simeon: looking.

Simeon lived for one thing.  He wanted to see one thing.  He waited for one thing.  He was searching for one thing.  He cared about one thing.  His heart was so driven by this one thing that when he finally held baby King Jesus in his arms, he literally said, “Now I can die” (Luke 2:29).

Is the promised Savior so precious to you that if you were to see Him come during your lifetime, you could genuinely say, “I can die now”?  And are God’s words so sure to you that you will wait expectantly until that day?  Not waiting like you wait in the doctor’s office, not waiting like you wait as you swing on the front porch watching for the mailman, not waiting like you wait in line at the grocery store, but waiting eagerly with intensity and focus and a burning eye turned toward the future.

God had told Simeon that he would see the hope of the ages with his own eyes.  God has told us that the coming of the Savior and the ultimate consummation of the kingdom is just moments away — one blink away, just around the corner, coming like a thief in the night.

My family has already opened our presents.  We opened them on Christmas Eve because my brother is leaving for Thailand on Christmas morning.  I got some nice gifts that I’m very grateful for.  But I didn’t really get what I wanted.

All I want for Christmas is Simeon’s hope.  That means two things: I want the same Christ that Simeon wanted, and I want to live with the same Christ-centered hope that Simeon had.  I want Jesus to come, and I want to be someone who’s looking for His coming.  Tonight I have neither in full measure: Christ is not fully reigning, and I do not love Him very much.  Tonight I am painfully aware of my worldly distractions and my selfish ambitions and my short-sighted hopes.  I feel anything but Christ-centered and Jesus-driven.  But of all the times to believe that God is a giver of great gifts, tonight would be it.  So I ask for a great blessing:

May God plant Simeon’s hope in our hearts, may Christ return in our generation, and may we be found looking when He comes.

“Though you have not seen Him, you love Him.  Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8).

Email Prayer Requests and People I Don’t Know

Probably like you, I get a number of email prayer requests.  Some requests are about people I know, and some are about people I’ve never heard of and will probably never hear about again, much less meet.  Even if the prayer request is from someone I’m familiar with, often the prayer need itself is about a person or a situation that’s very foreign to me.

How should I approach this?

One way is to take it upon myself to pray consistently and without fail for every prayer request I come across, whether I know the person or not, whether the request is large or small, and whether the request is permanent or short-lived.  I could write down every request in my prayer-book or print out every email and put it in my prayer-binder.  I honestly believe this would be a great service, and one that would reap fruit in eternity.  But while I’m not against this approach, it does seem unrealistic.  With the bounding leaps of technological advancement comes the ability to know about anything and everything going on anywhere and everywhere in the world.  You can check your In-Box one time and get a group email telling you about the state of a persecuted house-church in China, an institutional email telling you about the birth complications of the sister of the wife of the Human Resources director, a personal email from a friend asking you to pray for strength in fighting discouragement, and a church email documenting fifty prayer requests for people in the church body broken down in categories of leadership, missions, evangelism, ministry needs, health, employment, and pregnancies.  That’s not an exaggeration.  And all of these are significant requests.  So must they all be on your daily or weekly or monthly or categorical (or however you do it) prayer list?

I don’t necessarily think so.  The reason I’m saying this is not to deempphasize interceding for people you don’t know or praying for situations that are far away from your sphere of life.  I think that’s a wonderful thing to do.  If some of you pray that much and that consistently for every prayer request you come across, please don’t take this as a discouragement to your labor.  Keep doing it.  Great is your reward in heaven.  But I think that if I tried to pray consistently for every single prayer request I’ve heard about in the past six months, I would have to be unfaithful in a number of other areas of life, including prayer — prayer for the people who are closest to me or whose spiritual lives I am somehow more responsible for than others or who have asked for my support in prayer or whom I have committed to pray for or who have greater and more immediate needs than all the other more distant requests that I glance at on any given day.

So why am I saying this, if not to deemphasize this type of prayer?  I’m simply saying it to try to free some of you who (like me) might sometimes feel immediately guilty when you see a prayer request in your In-Box or in your mailbox or in a newsletter or crossing your mind.  Just because you don’t have a photographic memory and an infinite ability to recall prayer requests and a perfect filing system which has no cracks through which a forgettable prayer request could slip doesn’t mean that you can’t be faithful in prayer.  You can be, as God gives His help.

So this is basically what I do when I receive an email prayer request about something fairly distant and someone I don’t really know:  First, I read the email.  Then, I pause briefly and try to let the reality of the situation settle in so that I have at least a small sense of weeping with those who weep or rejoicing with those who rejoice (and so that my prayers are not dull and lifeless but as heartfelt and passionate as I can make them with the help of God’s Spirit).  Then I pray for the person and the situation as I sit in front of my computer.  At that point, I normally delete the email.  If I sense more of a burden to remember the request, I’ll leave it in my In-Box or farm it out to its appropriate folder and pray over it occasionally until I feel like deleting it.  If it really strikes a chord, I might print it and put it in my prayer-binder (a slowly-developing system that I started a few months ago).  But if I’ve deleted it, I simply entrust my memory of it to the Lord.  If He brings it to mind throughout the course of the next few days or weeks or months, I try to pray for it then and there without necessarily feeling guilty for not having prayed about it relentlessly.

As I write this, memories come flooding to mind.  Distant memories of people I’ve never met who prayed for my brother when he had his brain tumor in 2000.  Recent memories of friends’ friends who are praying for Judah and our adoption.  Biblical memories of Paul praying for the Colossians whom he had never met.  These intercessory servants were burdened to pray for me and for people close to me (or for small churches 2,000 years ago), even though they had no idea who we were and probably had many other things to pray about.  I am eternally grateful to the Lord that they prayed, and that He answered their prayers.

Nevertheless, I think that we should trust the Lord to show us who and what He wants us to pray for when it comes to the thousands of distant prayer needs that flood our lives each month.  You may not be able to pray constantly for everything and everyone you ever hear about, but don’t let this discourage you from praying constantly.  Sometimes by trying to pray for everything, I have failed to pray for the most basic prayer needs that God has put before me.

Obviously this is an opinion post and a thinking-out-loud post, not a this-is-what-the-Bible-says post.  I’d be interested to hear your own thoughts, about this or related issues.

Remembered Grace: An Anniversary and a Birthday

Today was our four-year wedding anniversary.  It was also Judah’s first birthday.  Cindi and I were married on December 20th, 2002, and Judah was born (unbeknownst to us at the time) on December 20th, 2005.

The end of the semester was very lopsided for me as I worked overtime to finish my M.Div. at The Master’s Seminary.  Maybe posts here will be a bit more regular over Christmas Break.

But this occasion calls for at least a brief tribute — not to us, but to the Lord.

We have not necessarily filled the day with special events, since we just returned from two days away with Cindi’s aunt and uncle in beautiful Monterey.  But both Cindi and Judah are on my heart.  I could never repay God for all the joy He has given me in my wife and my son, so I’m glad that He does not ask for repayment but only the worship of Christ-centered enjoyment and honest gratitude.

Anniversaries and birthdays are good times to celebrate the goodness of God in traditional and fresh ways.  Traditions reflect the constancy of God’s faithfulness, and fresh celebrations reflect His vivacity.  We need both because God’s traditional faithfulness is not stale and His lively works are not whimsical.  He is always the same, but often in new ways.  Yet the newness of His yearly grace never jeopardizes the rhythmic, predictable pattern of His steadfast love.

From now on, December 20th will be a double blessing in my life — the reminder of my precious marriage with my bride as well as the gift of my first-born son.  Always this will be a day of remembered grace.

Happy Judah

Oh my goodness: