2 Corinthians 5:17

In the text Paul is speaking and says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone and the new has come."

It is obvious that I have already seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the movie that has surpassed all box office predictions. It was a low budget film, and a rollicking good movie. If you haven't seen it, it is about a Greek girl who is immersed in her Greek family with all its ethnocentricity. She has a father who thinks Windex will save the world. If you have a fever blister, he'll put Windex on it. He probably thinks Windex is a cure for cancer. The movie goes through all the ethnocentricities of this Greek family — their food, their custom. They are boisterous, humorous, and somewhat embarrassing to the girl. She falls in love with a guy who is uninformed of the Greek way. He is from an uptight WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) family. These two come together, and he gets involved with her Greek family and their customs. He is even baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church which was a very tender scene. He ends up saying, "I'm just going to become a Greek Orthodox. I'll send my children to Greek schools, and we'll live happily ever after." It was a very popular movie, and it broke all records.

Life is really this way. The Bible is one big, fat collection of crazy personalities. We have really done damage to the Bible when we take all these personalities in the Bible and line them up like plaster saints in the window. When we say their names, we say it with solemnity. When we preach them, they become plaster saints. We never see the humanity of these people because we make them one-dimensional. So I started reading about them again and saw them as one carefree good family of God. God in His wisdom did not give us a 25-volume set of theological propositions that we need to understand. That's the way you and I think about things. God in His wisdom took truth, wrapped it up in flesh, and sent it to us. That is what the Christmas celebration is all about — truth wrapped up in flesh, Jesus Christ. God said, "If you want to know what life is like, just look at these people. They are marbleized in their personalities." You see all the layers in them. No one in the Bible is as good as we make them, except for Jesus. No one in the Bible is as bad as we make them either.

If you look at the characters in the Bible, you are looking at our spiritual family tree. In fact, as you look at these beautiful, wonderful, spirited characters, you will say, "I know someone like that. I've been cheated like he cheated. My brother is just as jealous of me as Cain and Able were." In fact, there was no such thing as brotherly love in the Bible. Name two brothers in the Bible who got along. Cain killed his brother Abel. The prodigal son's brother was jealous. As we look at all these wonderful personalities, let's let them teach us. We can learn some wonderful things from them.