As I write this there are just 51 days, 14 hours and 34 minutes until Christmas. That means that most of our shopping will be done in the next 30 days (give or take). Yes, Christmas is exciting, magical, wonderful, heartwarming, loving, and whatever adjective you can think of to describe this time of year. With that in mind, I wanted to get a good jump on the Christmas rush with a challenge I’ve been pushing for the last four years – Advent Conspiracy. Some of you may be new to this and so, for the sake of clarity I want to give you a brief synopsis of what this means…

The Advent Conspiracy is an idea a friend of mine in Illinois told me about (you can see more about it at www.adventconspiracy.org). The idea is that we take back Christmas from consumerism. It is simply a conspiracy among believers to recapture a true celebration of Christmas in the midst of a culture that is clamoring for more stuff while giving less of themselves to each other. The conspiracy can be summed up in four succinct tenets:

Worshipping fully is about getting back to the true message of Christmas:

“This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.” (1 John 4:10 The Message)

Christmas should be a time of getting caught up in the story – His story. We’ve messed everything up with our sin. Just take a look around during the holidays and see how many people are fighting, depressed and stressed. This just proves that we need someone to step in and rescue us; we need a hero; His name is Jesus. Jesus came into our story to change our story from tragedy to triumph, from doom to redemption. God’s amazing grace changes everything in our lives and that is what should capture our attention during Christmas. This knowledge transforms us from spenders to worshippers. God rescues us to create a worshiping throng. This is what happened to the shepherds and what should happen to us.

“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.” (Luke 2:20 ESV)

And now we have even less time before Christmas!

Grace & Peace,