Christmas is a time of celebration. We celebrate family, time off, good food, and presents under the tree.

But if that is all Christmas is about, if that’s all that is behind our celebration, than many people around the world have few reasons to “be of good cheer” on Christmas morning.

Thankfully, Christmas is about something far greater.

We celebrate because Christmas is about salvation. God the Son dwelled among us to save his people and set things to rights.

In session two of The Purpose of Christmas, Rick Warren explains what was involved in that salvation. We were saved from something: our sin, ourselves in all our pride and brokenness, and our separation from God. We were saved for something: a purpose bigger than ourselves and our own personal success, a purpose centered on being part of God’s plan and his people. And we were saved by something, a gift: the grace of God that gave us what we needed instead of what we deserved.

As we enter this holiday season, let us all remember the good news of Jesus’ Advent, and the true Purpose of Christmas.

After eight days of set up, tear down, author interviews, and working the booth at ETS, AAR, and SBL, I was ready to go home.

The trip was excellent, and I was feeling very blessed by the opportunity to meet so many brilliant authors, get to know the team at Z better, and see the national conventions firsthand, but after a week straight of work few things sound better than falling asleep in your own bed.

Alas, it was not to be.

Expecting that the airport would be incredibly busy because of the upcoming holiday, I gave myself plenty of extra time to get through security. Having made it through with time to spare I was feeling good about my chances of getting home later that evening. Then, on the screen, I noticed our plane was being delayed by an hour.

A storm in Chicago was delaying our departure, which was problematic because I had a one hour layover in Chicago before the last flight out to Grand Rapids left. I sat fretting for a while, before being assured by the staff that they would make up the time in the air. That sounded good in theory, but then we sat on the tarmac, for forty five minutes.

Now, forty five minutes isn’t that long, but it was just long enough to ensure that sprinting to my connecting flight was going to be a hopeless venture.

I did it anyway.

As I ran up, out of breath and exhausted, I was told they shut the door two minutes ago, wouldn’t be letting me on, and couldn’t give me a hotel room because the delay was due to weather. I watched as the last flight home taxied away from the gate. When I then asked a manager if they could please reconsider comping me a hotel room for the night, I was told “I could, but I’m not going to.”

At least they were honest!

Not wanting to go through the hassle of finding a hotel, and now on principle not wanting to pay for one, meant my only option was to join the dozens of people assigned to sleep on cots.

You know what? Cots are the worst. They are loud, so hard you have to continually move so your body doesn’t go numb, and about two inches shorter than I am. Also, blankets that are one foot wide at best – not helpful.

Combine that with bright lights, intercom announcements every five minutes, and a guy who snores so loud you start to wonder if he’s faking it just to mess with everyone else, and you are in for a great night’s sleep.

To top it off, all of us cot-sleeping temporary refugees were woken up at 4:00AM so the cots could be put away and the airline could clear out the hall they put us in. Classy move.

Eventually I did of course make it home, and if nothing else it gives me a story to tell. But it makes me think, maybe Trains, Planes, and Automobiles was more of an “it’s funny because it’s true” sort of film than I realized.

- Mason

From the fall of the great and bountiful Roman Empire, to the birth of the Renaissance, Europe entered a period of stagnation and barbarity called the Dark Ages.

Or did it?

Most of us heard some version of that story in school, but now most historians believe that narrative is completely contrary to the what we actually know about those years.

In session three of The Birth of Freedom, we learn that although the Middle Ages started out with a difficult period of recovery after the fall of Rome, over time it proved to be an era marked by discovery, invention, and increased human dignity.

A few hundred years after the fall of Rome, a European economy which had once been driven by slave labor was now reliant on merchants, serfs, and nobles – not the freedom we enjoy today but compared to its history Europe had enterd a time of unparalleled freedom.

The reason for this shift away from slavery? Dave Stotts argues that it was the influence of the Church, and its revolutionary message that all people are created in the image of God.

Perhaps the Dark Ages were not so dark after all.

Congrats to Phil who won a copy of Chuck Swindoll’s Insights on Revelation!

You can order the book here, and read one bloggers openion of it in this recent review,

“Quite a few years ago, I worked through Revelation from beginning to end. My lingering memory from that self-guided tour was that it read like the ramblings of a hippy on an acid trip. If you have ever been through it, you know just how utterly bizarre the language is. But now, in reading this detailed study with an experienced guide stepping me through verse by verse, I came away with much more understanding of God’s plan for the end times during what is referred to as the Apocalypse.”