I have to start out by saying Merry Christmas.  It is the holiday season and as we are here in Clovis, NM we have seen such a different style of Feliz Navidad. 

Most of you who know me, knows that I am not one to preach or push Christ of religion on anyone, but I TRY to live the way the Christ would have it so others can see Him through me.  As always, I fall short of it.  But as we were watching the Christmas parade last night on Main St. in Clovis.  Things were very cold, sirens were going off everywhere, people were dancing to hispanic Christmas music, and for a little bit it seemed as if everything was in fast forward.  You couldn't here anybody really talking to each other, it was practically chaos. 

Just about the middle of the parade one particular float was passing and I could not read what they had spelled out in lights on the side of the float.  Just then it was like time stood still and it was just me and this other guy and his girlfriend on the street.  It was like he had a megaphone pointed right at my ear.  All I heard was... "That says happy birthday"  "Why in the world would they put that..." "How about Merry Christmas or something... but happy birthday" 

I was blown away.  He really didn't know whose birthday they were celebrating... I guess in my sheltered life, I thought everybody in America at least knew what Christmas was about at least behind the scenes.  Even though they might not celebrate Christmas for that reason, I thought everybody knew...

Please pray for those who still don't know who Jesus is, I am not saying pray for people who are not Christians, please pray for those who really have not have not heard the good news. 

What do you love to do? Chances are that love can be tapped into as service for the Lord. This kind of thinking may seem obvious, but it is radical at least to my Christian upbringing.

 

I grew up with a kind of warped Christianity that taught that if I was passionate about something, it was probably wrong. God was the great killjoy in the sky. Virtue was painful. The good usually felt bad. The bad (we were told) felt good. Denying yourself meant never doing anything you really wanted to do. Conversely, if you hated doing something, that was most likely what God was calling you to do. "God, please don't send me toAfrica" was a prayer you'd better not pray, because that was the first place he would probably send you if you prayed that prayer. As you might imagine, this kind of thinking turned out a generation of very dull, boring Christians who were always suspicious of having fun. Where do you think the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live came from, anyway?

Actually, God is one who delights in giving us our heart's desire. In fact, he's the one who gave us our desires in the first place, and he gave them to us not to frustrate us but to help us be useful and fulfilled in our service for him.

Think of what you know about King David in the Old Testament. Now here's a guy who obviously loved music, poetry, women, and war. So he became a warrior/king and all his passions, in their proper places and under the Spirit's control, drove him to be not only a great king, but a man after God's own heart. God didn't give him all these passions and then tell him to spend his life being a scribe in a cave somewhere. (He saved that for me!)

As a child, I had a passion for music. I would spend hours doodling on the piano, and when I got my first guitar, it became the goal of my life to make the same sounds I heard in my favorite songs. When, as a young adult, God put the idea in my head to use all these passions and skills to write and perform music about his Gospel and his truth, I thought I wasn't hearing correctly at first. That couldn't be serving God; that would be too much fun! It took an adjustment of my understanding of God and his ways to really believe God was in this. Now I know that this is the way he works. If he wants us to do something, he'll put a desire in our heart to do it.

God is not in the frustrating business; he is in the fulfilling, joy-filled business. So if you are desirous of serving God, think first about what you can do and what you love to do. Serving God will be along those lines.

Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotional