I know the battle I faced as
a teenager. Today’s younger generation faces something more challenging.

It wasn’t easy for a guy to find
pornography when I was a teenager. I remember giving into the temptation to buy
a Hustler magazine when I was in high
school. Inside the drug store I paced back and forth near the magazine rack for
at least half an hour. My palms were sweaty. My heart was racing. I finally
walked to the front of the store, put the magazine face down on the counter and
avoided eye contact with the clerk as I forked over the cash.

I grew bolder in my sin when I graduated
from high school. When I turned 18, I went to downtown Atlanta to visit an
“adult bookstore” (a strange label, really, since the men who frequented these
seedy establishments did not act like mature adults). In 1976, anyone who
wanted to see hard-core porn had to visit these awful places with garish signs
and painted-over windows.

God
is working all around us today. Don’t let negative headlines
distract you from the real story.

2010 was a year of
shaking. It began with a magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti, followed by
an 8.8 quake in Chile, followed by the eruption of the Iceland
volcano that sent tons of ash into the skies over Europe and shut
down air travel faster than you could say Eyjafjallajokull.
While the ground shook, economies in Europe teetered. As floods
displaced 13 million people in Pakistan, Americans worried that we
might drown in federal debt.

 There were plenty of negative
headlines—which explains why one of the biggest movies of the year
(Inception) was about a guy who escaped reality by dreaming.
We had the BP oil spill, the WikiLeaks scandal, double-digit
unemployment, and angry debates about Obamacare, illegal immigrants
and full-body scanners. There were a few bright spots, especially in
October when 33 Chilean miners climbed out of a dark shaft and donned
T-shirts that read, “GRACIAS, SENOR!”

Back in November when autumn leaves were their brightest orange, I met with a group of young men on the campus of a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire. While these students were eating bagels and drinking coffee I began our Bible study by asking each guy to share his name, his major and how long he’d been a Christian.

When it was time for a young man named Cody to share, he said innocently: “I haven’t given my life to Christ yet, but I’d like to.” So before our meeting was finished we led Cody in a sinner’s prayer, gave him a Bible and got him started on the road to discipleship by asking him to read the Gospel of Mark.

Please don’t let the holidays get so cluttered that you
miss the point of the celebration.

Christmas is usually cluttered. We’re overbooked with
parties, concerts, football games and shopping trips while our houses are
jammed with decorations, out-of-town guests and way too much food. Then on
Christmas morning, after the presents have been opened, we sweep up the
crumpled giftwrap, tinsel, ribbons, bows, pine needles and boxes that are
scattered everywhere. As much as I love the joy of this season (eggnog is my
weakness), I struggle to make sure I don’t lose the profound simplicity of
Christmas amid the sensory overload.

This year I decided to pay closer attention to the names
of Jesus used in the Christmas story. These names are like wrapped gifts—you
have to open them carefully to savor their meaning. You might want to share
these names with your loved ones at your Christmas dinner, or take a break from
the stress of the holidays to look up these Scriptures and ponder them
carefully. Remember: Jesus is God’s present to us. Have you fully unwrapped
this amazing gift?

It’s bad enough that rabid secularists hate Christmas.
It’s downright tragic that some Christian purists judge others for celebrating
the holiday.

Two
weeks ago when I wrote about how God worked in the lives of people in the biblical
Christmas story, several readers jumped in to remind me that the modern
celebration of Christmas is a pagan holiday that is luring unsuspecting,
gift-giving revelers into hell itself. One person who identified himself as
“Albert” wrote in our online forum that he “isn’t comfortable celebrating
Christmas” because of its demonic origins.

You
probably know there are many Christians who boycott Christmas for various
reasons—some factual and some quite debatable. These people insist:

*
The holiday has become too commercialized and promotes greed. (I would agree.)

There would be no Christmas story without the Holy
Spirit’s power.

We Christians are notorious for limiting the Holy Spirit.
Many churches put Him in the back seat, confine Him in a box of tradition or
ignore Him altogether. Some Christians treat the Third Person of the Trinity as
if he magically materialized in the Book of Acts, like a genie out of a bottle,
and then vanished after the early church was established.

But God is God, not a genie, and the same Holy Spirit who
brooded over the waters at Creation, inspired the Old Testament prophets and
empowered the first disciples at Pentecost is still doing miracles today. It is
also important to recognize that the Holy Spirit was involved in every step of
the Christmas story. This holiday, I’m paying closer attention to the Spirit’s
work in the miracle of the Incarnation.

Aussie missionaries Les and
Sally Freeman have given their lives to reach the neglected Aborigines.

Most Americans fondly remember Steve
Irwin, the Australian wildlife lover and gregarious host of Crocodile Hunter who wrestled
reptiles on camera and then died in 2006 after an attack by a sting ray. He was
the epitome of Aussie spunk. Yet I’ve learned there are Aussie Christians with
the spiritual equivalent of Irwin’s daredevil courage.

A prime example: Les Freeman, a
31-year-old Pentecostal preacher who has been planting churches in Aboriginal
areas of northern Australia for nine years. He doesn’t wrestle crocs, but this
tough guy and his brave wife, Sally, have battled snakes, demonic curses and
environmental hardships to take Christ’s love to a neglected mission field.

Most Christmas pageants focus on the principal characters of the nativity story—an innocent Mary, a bewildered Joseph, awestruck shepherds and…

In today’s hip, sophisticated
churches, we often forget to preach about Jesus. Let’s get back to basics.

I became a serious Christian at the tail
end of the Jesus movement. I was too young to remember the hippie beads,
tie-dyed shirts and “Jesus Is Groovy” slogans, but the songs were still popular
when I was in college (from musicians such as Andrae Crouch, Love Song and
Barry McGuire), as were the movies (especially The Cross and the Switchblade.)

The Jesus movement was like a spiritual
tsunami that washed over hundreds of thousands of young people in the late
1960s and early ‘70s and brought them into a personal relationship with Christ.
Some of these kids had been drug addicts and social misfits; most were just
average Joes and Janes who discovered that Jesus is a lot more exciting than
traditional churches had led them to believe.

Evangelist Scott Hinkle and
his wife, Nancy, have sold everything to reach one of the most unchurched
regions of the United States.

I’m not a fan of Jersey Shore, the MTV reality show that
features Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and a band of 20-somethings who share a
house near Seaside Heights, N.J. The program glamorizes casual sex, celebrates
alcohol abuse and degrades an entire ethnic community by using the racial
epithets “Guido” and “Guidette” to describe Italian-American guys and girls.

But one thing is for sure: Jersey Shore accurately portrays the
gritty urban region south of New York City. It is one of the most unchurched
areas of the country, and it’s also known as the heroin capital of the United
States.