Bible Gateway Blog

This month, one of my friends is celebrating his one-year anniversary… of not buying video games.

It’s not that he has anything against video games—in fact, he loves them. But he had a sizeable collection of older games already amassed, and buying new ones was cutting into his finances and adding to family stress. So he decided to simply stop.

This might seem like a pretty minor, even trivial, New Year’s resolution to make. It’s certainly less impressive-sounding than resolutions like losing 50 pounds, or learning a new language, or running a marathon. But on reflection, it strikes me as the sort of New Year’s resolution that more of us should be making.

When we make resolutions, at the New Year or any other time, we tend to focus on big commitments that we perceive will improve our lives. Resolutions are typically new activities—things that we feel are missing from our lives or that we ought to be doing. But they also have a tendency to add to our lives. They give us new things to think about, focus on, and even worry about.

These are often very good things, and I’d never suggest that you shouldn’t embark on a resolution, however big, that you’re passionate about. But when it comes to cultivating your spiritual health, one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s the accumulation of all the little concerns in our lives that most gets in the way of more Bible reading, prayer, and reflection.

Our God is a God of peace. In Psalm 46, we are told that peace and stillness are appropriate places in which to contemplate our Creator:

Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations,
I am exalted in the earth. — Psalm 46:10 (NRSV)

What are the little things—the minor habits, the small concerns, the trivial thoughts and activities that keep your mind spinning throughout the day, preventing your heart from settling down into a posture of peace? What little activities or obsessions eat into your quiet time with God, or cloud your day with a tiny bit of extra stress? What little things can you drop out of your life next year that tug at your mind and keep you from peace? Something that’s relatively easily cut out of your life, whose absence would leave you with a bit of extra energy to spend on the things that really matter?

For my friend, it was keeping up with the latest video games. For you, it might be a sports obsession that cuts into time with your kids, or obsessive Facebook checking, or a few TV shows you watch but don’t really need in your life, or checking in at work on the weekends when you don’t need to, or a Twitter account that is always occupying a corner of your mind.

By all means, consider those big, life-changing New Year’s resolutions—those can be blessings too. But as you think about what you want to do in 2013, take some time to also think about what you don’t want to do in 2013.

Hopefully, at this point in the Christmas season, you are wrapping up your end-of-year workload and are looking forward to Christmas and New Year’s. If you’re fortunate enough to have time off of work and other duties this holiday season, enjoy it! And even if you’re stuck at work, still plowing through a hefty to-do list, or struggling with other challenges, we hope that the peace of Christmas will nevertheless find a way into your heart this week.

Here are three quick Bible Gateway-related items to keep in mind this week:

• As usual, we’re launching into 2013 with a big new lineup of email devotionals and newsletters. We haven’t “officially” announced all of them yet (that’ll come in the next two weeks), but you can get a sneak peak at our upcoming devotionals—and sign up in advance—at our newsletter page. (We’re sneaky like that.) Watch this space for more detail on each of those in the very near future.
• If you’re thinking about reading through the Bible in 2013, don’t forget we have a variety of Bible reading plans to help you do that. Most of them restart on January 1. Take some time to look through our reading plans in advance and see if one of them looks right for you.
• Hopefully, most of your Christmas shopping is done at this point—I don’t envy anybody who still has to brave the crowds at the mall. But if you still have a few gifts to pick up (or aren’t up for an epic mall expedition at this point), don’t forget the Bible Gateway store. It’s got everything from books to music to gifts, and shopping there is also a great way to support Bible Gateway.

What are the things that have to be done in order for it to “feel” like Christmas?

The season between Halloweeen and New Year’s gets me thinking heavily about traditions. About the only holiday that prompts me to observe a set of traditions is Christmas. I find that it’s important to me to put up a tree, to hang ornaments, to set out the nativity display my parents brought back from a trip to Africa decades ago. These things are reminders to me to anticipate the day on which we celebrate our Savior’s birth. Other people, of course, have their own traditions.

To be honest, I’ve never really questioned why I find these things so important. They’re just part of what makes Christmas, Christmas. But why do they matter so much to me?

Recently, I read an article by Lisa Diller that discusses how important these little things are to our day-to-day faith: The Vital Importance of Irrelevant Rites. Here’s an excerpt:

I am not going to use this place to defend our Christmas rites. But it strikes me that Christians often feel bound to try to update their celebrations, their traditions, their group-culture, to fit outsiders or to adapt them to the current trends in their societies.

The historian in me wants to make something very clear: Rituals and rites are by definition irrelevant to the current culture. They transcend time within a community. And because Christianity is a translated religion, because it has, since its inception, crossed cultural lines, its basic rituals are always outside the societal mainstream of whatever group the believers inhabit. But even within a culture, rites and rituals are such because they have no specific relevance to the “needs” of the day. They tie us to people and ideas that have gone before. They make us stop what we’re doing and participate with others in something that connects us to the past. […]

The sacred rites that we participate in as the Body of Christ allow us to take part in a holy rhythm that goes back for 2000 years. When we do these things, we enact the shared symbols that our fellow saints have been performing throughout all of Christian time and all around the world. There is no current relevance to these—they are rituals that Jesus asked us to do, that he did with his first disciples and that point us both forward and backward to his Advents. They remind us of the holiness of the time we inhabit. They remind us of who we really are, and whose we really are.

But there isn’t anything practical about them. Therein lies their beauty. They aren’t “efficient,” they aren’t getting things done. They aren’t feeding the poor or spreading the spoken/written Word. They aren’t for outsiders, either. They are for the initiate. And this makes us uncomfortable. We live in a world that expects everything to be immediately transparent. Again, the historian reminds us that “the past is a foreign country.” And in some ways, when we enact these rituals, we are visiting that place.

What about you? What Christmas traditions do you have? How do they connect you to your past—both in terms of your family and in terms of your faith? What traditions that feel most comforting to you and why?

Each Monday throughout Advent, we share a Psalm drawn from the newly-added Book of Common Prayer Daily Office Bible reading plan. This reading plan is built around the liturgical calendar and features Scripture readings appropriate for the season of Advent.

Psalm 63

O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,
and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
when I think of you on my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.

But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the power of the sword,
they shall be prey for jackals.
But the king shall rejoice in God;
all who swear by him shall exult,
for the mouths of liars will be stopped. — Psalm 63 (NRSV)