So What’s Under Your Tree?

By Dave Wilkinson

Psalm 103

December 22, 2002

If an alien from another planet were to drop in on America around December 23rd, he would find himself in another world. Not only would it be different from his own, it would be also be substantially different from our own. A magical transformation comes over our country sometime in the late fall.

Well, anyway, if such an alien were to attempt to report on the story behind this December effort, it might go like this (with apologies for ripping the whole concept from the old Mork and Mindy show).

“They have this amazing festival down here, that everyone gets into, but especially the stores and shopping malls. That’s sort of an enclosed walkway where you can go and meet your friends, and smell cookies and buy ice cream cones to spill on the clothes, and they’re all the same in every city. There’s an enormous computer somewhere that spits them out and drops them in the suburbs, right in the middle of a sea of automobiles that can’t move.

“Oh, the festival! Well, it’s all about a little boy, with a drum, and he’s born in a sleigh, in some straw, right next to some chestnuts roasting on an open fire…

“Yes, it is a bit dangerous, but it’s ok because he is guarded by this enormous fat man in a red suit, named Round John Virgin, standing by a tree with a partridge in it, drinking something called wassail—no, I’m not exactly sure what that is, and nobody here can tell me, but there’s a lady kneeling nearby with a light over her head, and a couple of sheep and a donkey and a camel and this really strange deer with a red electric nose, and a dog sleeping on top of his doghouse while a crotchety old man is hoisting this crippled boy on his shoulder who is holding a turkey by the neck and saying, “God bless us everyone!”

“Well, anyway, after they sing awhile, they take all these packages and wrap them up in paper, which they then take right off again and the little kids play with the paper and the older kids say ‘Is that all?’ And the fathers sit in front of the picture box and the mothers collapse on a chair.

“The festival concludes thirty days later with an observance called ‘Visa Card Day,’ when everybody becomes really serious, religious and worshipful. Millions of people open envelopes and say ‘My Lord!’”

Christmas is certainly a very busy and confusing time. Christmas 2002 is no different. At such a time, and with such a pace, we need to remember what Christmas is about. And sometimes this means that we need to remind ourselves to remember.

This is what David does. He talks to his own inner self and commands: “Bless the Lord O’ my soul. And all that is within me” – C’mon, feel it from the guts – “Bless His Holy Name.”

Before he chose Annie Hall as the title of his movie, Woody Allen considered called it Anhedonia -- a Greek word meaning the inability to be happy or to take pleasure. That title would have been most suitable, not only to Annie Hall, but also to much of Allen’s work.

Allen has understood better than most people the prevailing unhappiness of twentieth-century humanity, particularly in the western world. Still, many others have remarked that happiness seems to have little relationship to fame and fortune.

So where does happiness come from? It comes finally from recognizing and rejoicing in the goodness of God. As we focus on what God has done for us, and is doing, we can be set free from Anhedonia.

In the early days of aviation, a pilot was making a flight across the Carribean from island to island.. After he had been gone two hours from his last landing field, he heard a noise in his plane which he recognized as the gnawing of a rat. He realized that while his plane had been on the ground a rat had gotten in. For all he knew, the rat could be gnawing through a vital cable or control of the plane. It was very serious situation. At first he did not know what to do. It was two hours back to the landing field and more than two hours to the next field ahead. Then he remembered that the rat is a rodent. It is not made for heights. It is made to live on the ground and under the ground. Therefore, the pilot began to climb. He went up a thousand feet, then another thousand and another until he was over 15,000 feet up. The gnawing ceased. The rat was dead. He could not survive in the atmosphere of those heights. Later the pilot brought the plane safely to the landing field and found the dead rat.

Killing worry rats is what proper worship—a proper focus on what the Lord and His goodness -- can do for us. It can lift us to the heights. And in “the dwelling place of the Most High”, despair, purposelessness and worry must die.

The trouble is, our worried stomachs don’t always know this. Yours doesn’t and mine doesn’t either. David was the same way.

So David orders his soul—“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.” David is shaping his emotions, according to the facts—what some psychologists call self talk.

What are these facts? What are God’s gifts to us this Christmas that should shape our lives?

Well there are two gifts from God that David says are under our tree. One of these has a tag which reads “Open me first.” So we open that box and inside we find the gift from God to us of mercy.

In verse 8 David says God is “slow to anger and abundant in mercy.” This is the first gift. God is merciful and this mercy leads Him to saving actions.

First of all, out of his mercy, God forgives—“who pardons all your iniquities:” David writes:

“He will not always strive with us; nor will He keep His anger forever. For as high as the Heavens are above the earth, so great is His loving kindness toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”

How forgiven are we when God forgives? He puts our sins as far away from us as the east is from the west. God says in Isaiah 43:25: “I, even I, am the One who wipes out your transgressions for my own sake; and I will not remember your sins.”

Do you realize how liberating that is? Suppose you commit a sin and ask for God’s forgiveness. You are forgiven. But then you go out and you commit the same sin again. So you come to God and say: “I did it again!” What will God say? Will He say: “You sure weren’t very sorry last time, were you?” Will He say: “Once is enough. You’ve used up your forgiveness in that category”? No. You come to God and say: “I did it again!” What will God say? He’ll say: “You did what again?” “I, even I, am the One who wipes out your transgressions for my own sake; and I will not remember your sins.”

In this mercy God redeems. David writes: “Who redeems your life from the pit?”

The word redeem is Haggael which means the ransoming of life by a kinsman. God saves us from Hell because He considers us part of His family.

Now Paul writes that the wages of sin is death. That is true. That is justice. But, he says, “The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” David declares: “God has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.”

If a person stands accused of a crime—a crime he is guilty of committing—what does he want? Does he want justice? No. Justice means that he will be punished for what he has done. The guilty man doesn’t want justice. He wants off. He wants mercy. Mercy means that we don’t get what we deserve. And God gives us mercy. “He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.”

But there’s even more. Mercy is not getting what we deserve, but God even goes way beyond mercy. He also gives us grace. Grace is the second gift under our tree. For if mercy is not getting what we deserve, then grace is getting what we don’t deserve.

David writes: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious. Slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.” God is the One “who crowns you with loving kindness and compassion; who satisfies your years with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.”

David says that God not only saves us, He crowns us. As Paul writes in Ephesians, God makes us joint heirs with Jesus Christ.

In the words of the great Victorian preacher Charles Spurgeon: “Our Lord does nothing by halves, He will not stay His hand till He has gone to the uttermost with His people. Cleansing, healing, redemption, are not enough. He must make them kings and crown them. And the crown must be far more precious than if it were made of corruptible things, such as silver and gold; it is studded with gems of grace and lined with velvet of loving kindness; it is decked with the jewels of mercy, but made soft for the head to wear by a lining of tenderness. We do not earn the crown, for it is of grace not of merit; we feel our own unworthiness of it, therefore, He deals with us in tenderness; but He is determined to bless us, and therefore He is ever crowning us, always surrounding us with mercy and compassion. He always finishes what He begins, and where He gives pardon, He gives acceptance too.”

The ground of our newness is not our need but, the will of a loving Father. We need to remind ourselves of this. We are not saved by our feelings but by the grace of God. And sometimes, we need to talk to our souls the way David talks to his soul and command them to worship.

David Seamands writes in The Healing of Damaged Emotions, that “we relate to God on the basis of how we feel about God – not on what we believe about God – out of felt theology, not believed theology. Let me hear you pray,” he writes, “and I’ll write your theology.”

Our feelings are crucial. And our feelings can be shaped by the facts. This Psalm teaches that we need to shape our feeling about God by focusing on the gifts that God gives to us.

And it also teaches in verses 13 and 14 that we sometimes need to cut ourselves a bit of slack. I need to hear this. We do make mistakes. All of us. We aren’t iron. And the Psalm declares, “just as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. For He, Himself, knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust.”

You see, God knows us better than we know ourselves. He loves us more than we love ourselves. He forgives us more than we forgive ourselves. He wants more for us than we want for ourselves.

We are the ones God loves enough to identify with. He became dust with our dust.

David writes: “As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. When the wind has passed over it, it is no more; and it’s place acknowledges it no longer. But the loving kindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep His covenant.”

What is the covenant we are to keep? Well in John 6, some people come to Jesus and ask this same question: “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”

The One who God has sent is Jesus Christ. He has come into our world. That’s the message of Christmas. Personal; faith in Him is the essential doorway to receiving all of the other gifts of God. We are commanded to believe in Jesus. And as we do, we find ourselves redeemed, restored, crowned, and renewed.

So give yourself a gift. Don’t let the stores and the noise define Christmas for you. This week, command your soul to bless the Lord for His gift of His Son at Christmas.

Do a David! Command all that is within you—C’mon! Feel it from your gut!—to “bless His Holy Name.”