This week, let’s continue on into the following verses, which are deep with vivid imagery. The Lord is our shepherd. He makes us lie down in green pastures, He leads us beside still waters. He refreshes us and leads us along paths of righteousness. When I was a kid, memorizing these verses, I pictured my Papa’s house in the mountains of New York. His house was at the top of a hill, surrounded by woods, and at the bottom of the hill was a little stream and an apple grove. Everything about it was green and beautiful to my childhood imagination.

We’ve been at this for many years: since August of 2017. Over the years, Christmas has become an ever-increasing difficult topic to unpack over and over. Each year, I worry about how I can make it different, and put it in a slightly different vein than the years before. And I’ll admit, some of our Christmas devotions are my absolute favorite; finding completely new things to make Christmas and God brand new all over again. So this year, I was concerned over how I’d be able to pull it off all over again. And then I thought: Why not take a non-Christmas passage and relate it back to the Christmas story. So, for the next few weeks, I’d like to experiment with you and see what we can discover together by taking Psalm 23– one of the most recognized and culturized passages of scripture– and see if we can view it through the lens of Jesus’ birth to see anything new.

I’ve served as a worship leader for 13 years. It doesn’t feel like that long in my brain, but I started serving on my youth worship team when I was a freshman in high school. Over the years, I’ve served on multiple teams,both in the lead and in the background, at a handful of different churches with lots of different beliefs. There are a lot of different worship songs that spark debate amongst worship teams, especially now that worship songs are going under the microscope in terms of: is this worship to God, or man-centered worship under a problematic theology? One song that seems to be debated more often, I’ve noticed, is “Blessed Be Your Name” by Matt Redman.

I wanted to return to John, chapter 1 this week to finish up the little section that we’d been reading through together. I know, these opening verses seem so simple in nature, but they were really radical at the time they were written, and they really peel back parts of the gospel that might seem overplayed to us at times today.

My mom has been cleaning out the basement of her house. How do I know? Over the past week, I’ve gotten numerous texts asking if I want her to keep or send me certain childhood items to pass onto any children I may have one day. Disney VHS tapes, college decor, you name it. Well, one item she texted me, she knew I’d want to keep: the picture Bible that I’d always kept as a child. What I didn’t remember, was that someone very special had gifted that Bible to me: my Nana Jennie.

We’ve been traveling through the opening verses of the first chapter of John, going section by section to break down this beautifully complex introduction to the Gospel. The above verses continue to use this analogy of Jesus being the Light coming into the world, illuminating the Truth to those that accept it. Last week, we went into the section of verses that spoke about John the Baptist, and how his ministry bore witness to the light of who Jesus was going to be. John, himself, was not the light but he was a witness to the coming Light.

I’ve always had a lot of respect for John the Baptist. Here’s a guy, who lived primarily in the wilderness, whose entire ministry was to make people ready for someone else to come. That takes a truly selfless and purpose-driven person. And to me, in many ways, John the Baptist’s ministry is the ministry we all share today: to make people ready for Jesus. And the way people try to reach the lost these days– social media, Youtube, and church platforms that look more like a concert venue than a place of worship– it’s easy to get caught up in self-promotion dressed as God-driven purpose. And it’s proven, social media has an addictive quality, so what might start out as an account totally dedicated to sharing the Gospel and God’s love can totally become a source of self gratification when you see the likes and follows start rolling in.

The Gospel of John starts out differently than all the other gospels. Instead of going through the lineage of Jesus, a prophecy fulfilled, or the re-telling of His birth, John chooses to start at the beginning. No, not the beginning of Jesus’ life. The very beginning of creation, before time began itself. In five short verses, John is able to package and communicate a picture of the supremely vast and awesome fact that Jesus is sovereignly God. Using the Word, light, and life as analogies, John reinforces the existence of the Trinity, God as an uncreated Creator of all, and the pre-eminence of the Savior He is.

There have been three separate times where I’ve witnessed nature and felt simultaneously so small and powerless against the greatness of God’s creation, and comforted with the fact that the same Mastermind of this same landscape thought that I was important enough to include in His design. The first was at the foot of the colossal horseshoe at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The second was stepping out of the airport in Cape Town to see the three mountain peaks that makeup that city’s skyline: Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, and Lion’s Head. The third was this weekend, from the Fred W. Symmes Chapel in Camp Greenville, South Carolina.

The Proverbs 31 woman is the church’s best example of an exemplary wife, mother, and friend. Maybe we roll our eyes sometimes at how cliche it might be, but the fact of the matter is this: there is a reason she stands out from the rest. And if she is the model for all women to strive for in their Christian walk, then logically, she must fall in line with what we’ve been talking about. That’s why I wanted to end our series about submission here: at the pinnacle, the best among us. So that, hopefully, after all this unpacking of, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” we could have something to aspire towards and remind us of the fact that when Paul tells women to honor their husbands, it isn’t to hide them away, but to help them flourish in the space God has given them to occupy as women.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing what Paul really means when he tells wives to be submissive to their husbands in Ephesians. It is my deep desire that, if you’ve been reading along, you have found peace surrounding the subject and that the Lord’s character has shone through. This week, I want to further delve into the subject by taking the key verse through which the other side of the argument stakes its claim to validity. And I’m not talking about those that just flat out renounce God and the Bible. I’m talking about Christians; those that believe that wives being submissive to husbands is an “antiquated cultural ideal” that died off with tunics and the Roman Empire. The thought process on that end of the spectrum is that there should be no submission between genders when God has declared us all as one.

Husbands and wives are addressed many times throughout the New Testament, and it seems that one doesn’t receive a command without the other. I find it interesting that when people bring up “Wives submit to your husbands,” there is not conversation in the same breath about a husband’s obligation to love his wife as if she were his own body. And that’s not some prosaic prattle from Paul to the Ephesians. He’s not giving the women a literal command to submit and then giving the men some flowery metaphor to live by. Sit and consider this with me for a moment: Paul commands husbands to love their wives as if they were a part of his own body. Not a thought, nor a suggestion. They are morally obligated to do so by scripture.

Submission. In 2021, that’s an uncomfortable word when it comes to relationships. In a “woke” culture that champions girl-bossing, equality, and feminism, submission feels like a dirty word. A social taboo that culture twists to say, “See? The Bible is an antiquated book. Why would you live by that? It devalues women as the lesser sex! Only a bigoted jerk would still follow it!” And the only reason people can get away with saying that is because the church has done a poor job at explaining the subject of, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”

I prayed the sinner's prayer when I was about 10 years old, or at least, that’s the first time I remember praying it with a full realization of what I was doing and committing to. Before that, I was parroting along the words my teacher asked us to repeat during Sunday school “altar calls.” I went to the same church until I was 25. I sat under the same pastor, worshiped in the same building, and learned most of what I knew about the Bible in that church. I feel it’s very important to note: I love that church. I still have nothing but deep gratitude to the man that pastored that church while I was there and led a community where ultimately, I found a place of my own.

We’ve all done it. Maybe it’s the Sunday scaries, with a new work week looming on the horizon. Maybe it’s our family or the plans we’ve made for our weekends. Maybe our own personal workload between balancing a clean house, social lives, love interests, whatever it may be.

The Book of Ephesians is one of the most beautiful letters Paul writes to the church. It’s a favorite among many, including myself, and Ephesians 1 is the overture that sets the tone to this awe-inspiring encouragement to the church. Within chapter 1, verses 3 through 14 is a dense preamble that touches upon things like grace, adoption, inheritance, blessing, redemption, glory to God, and truth. There is too much to say about it in one devotion, and if we did, we could be here for weeks and weeks on that passage alone.