Month: December 2025

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There Is A Bigger Story

Have you ever seen a leaf caught in an eddy current at the side of a river? It doesn’t matter how fast and powerful the main river current is flowing down the centre; the leaf circles close to the bank. Sometimes the leaf even floats backwards!

Meditating on the miracle of Christ this season has been a powerful awakening for my soul to the bigger story. Too often, in 2025, I have been living out of my small story. My financial challenges, my work trials, my unused gifts, my struggles with sin… small, small, small. It feels like I have been that leaf floating in circles, when I should have been plumb in the centre of the eternal current, hurtling downstream in the unfolding glorious eternal story that God is writing across the cosmos.

Christ is with us! Emmanuel is with me!! He has invaded my small existence and drawn me into His eternal plot. It is no longer about me. It is about Him and His reconciliation of all time and space to Himself. All is being reconciled to Christ. And I get to be a part of that!

But oh Lord, my eyes so often drift from His greatness to my smallness… From His infinitude to my lack. Oh Lord, I drift to the edges and get stuck in a little circling current… round and round but going nowhere.

My heart’s prayer for 2026 is to live out of the bigger story.

After the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, the mundane events of life must have taken on a new significance for the family… A new sacredness. Feeding and cleaning their baby boy… sacred. Teaching him to talk and watching him explore the world… sacred. And what about the normal challenges of life? Feeding a family. Finances. Paying taxes. I imagine there must have been a deep sense of God-with-them, that everything would work out because God had His hand on their lives. I imagine that the things that might have seemed like big things before were now trivial in the shadow of stewarding the arrival of the Messiah. They knew they were a part of something eternally monumental.

That’s what I mean by living out of the bigger story. The things that are big things for those who do not walk with God should be trivialities for those of us who do. Otherwise, who is Christ to us? Job security? Trivial. Mortgage payments? Trivial. Political upheaval? Trivial. We are stewarding the Presence of God in this world. We are stewarding the second coming of Christ! Are our eyes on Him? Are we attending to His plans? Are we tending to Him? I know I am guilty of living out of my small story way more than the Eternal Current.

Oh Jesus, keep me in the centre of the river! Hold my face in Your hands that my eyes may ne’er drift from Your face. Let me be aware of your Presence in the marrow of my bones that all the affairs and challenges of this temporality may grow dim in comparison to Thee. Smite me with Your love. Aflame my heart for You only. Burn to dust every distraction and rogue desire that tempts my eyes from Thy Beauty. Oh, unmake me until my soul is a song of worship to You only; an eternal haunting ballad written in flesh, primal and pure.

Let my song be a drop in the river; one of a billion drops, making playful melody over smooth pebbles, interludes building suspense in shadowy pools, and pore-raising crescendos of glorious cascading waterfalls. Until we all empty our lives into the Sea of Eternity.

There is a bigger story, my friend.

Copyright 2025, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.

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How Is Waiting Changing You?

This Advent, I am stirring my heart up for Jesus with the aid of a series of Advent meditations from John Mark Comer and the Practicing The Way community. Their first meditation is by Gemma Ryan and comes from Luke 2, where Simeon encounters the baby Jesus in the temple.

As I meditated on this man Simeon, I wondered what made him different from his peers.
Between Malachi and Jesus’ arrival is the 400-year period known as the ‘silent years’ because God did not speak to His people during that period. It is this 400-year wait in silence from which the Scribes and Pharisees emerged. Four hundred years without a word from God. Four hundred years waiting for the Messiah to deliver them from oppression. So, what did they do? They doubled down on what they did have – the Torah. They dissected it, memorized it, debated it, and built culture around it. All the while, drifting further and further from God. To the extent that when the Messiah finally arrived, for all their knowledge of and dedication to the laws of God, they had no ability to recognize Him when He stood right in front of them.

But Simeon was different.

Whereas the Pharisees pressed into practices that relied on their cognition, reasoning, and intellectual ability, Simeon was a man of the Spirit. The Bible says that the Holy Spirit was upon Simeon, and he was led by the Spirit. In a time before the Holy Spirit was poured out on all flesh! Somehow, Simeon has stepped into a dimension of relationship with God that was uncommon among his peers.

While the Scribes and Pharisees depended on knowing the Law, Simeon depended on knowing the Spirit. The Bible says that he was righteous and devout. I believe these words are significant. I believe the word righteous suggests that Simeon was probably as dedicated as the Scribes and Pharisees were to observing the Law. However, I believe the word devout indicates that he also had a commitment to and holy reverence for God Himself. Simeon was not just devoted to knowing the Law; he was devoted to knowing God. He engaged not only in cognitive practices but spiritual practices that honed his ability to host, be led by, and know the Holy Spirit.

Without a live connection with God, knowledge makes us puffed up, self-righteous, overly confident in our knowledge, and ultimately unable to recognize God because He isn’t recognized through intellectual reasoning but through spiritual discernment. That’s why the Scribes and Pharisees couldn’t recognize Jesus. They were using all the wrong senses and looking at all the wrong measures. They were concerned with whether He healed on the Sabbath, or which town He came from, or His outrageous claims to be the Son of God. We too have our boxes just as they had theirs, and if it doesn’t fit in the box, then it cannot be an authentic move/person/word of God.

However, Simeon was led by the Spirit. All Simeon desperately wanted was to see Jesus, and He was utterly dependent on God to orchestrate and define that encounter. There was nothing Simeon could do to achieve it; he just had to wait and be open to receiving Jesus, however He chose to show up.

What challenged me the most in this meditation was the idea that waiting changes you. There are many promises that I feel that I have been waiting on for some time in my life, and particularly in this season. And I’m wondering… am I becoming a Pharisee or a Simeon?
Am I engaging in practices that are making me puffed up and self-righteous? Or am I engaging in practices that are attuning me to the Spirit and what He is doing now while I wait? Am I waiting on God or on an outcome? Is my hope in Jesus or in the thing that I’m waiting for? Will I even recognize Him when He turns up in a way I didn’t expect or prefer? Will I still be happy to see Him if He doesn’t come the way I think He should? If He doesn’t deliver me from my ‘Roman oppressors’, will I still rejoice? Can I wait on God as an act of surrender that acknowledges everything will happen in His time and on His terms? And can I be joyful in that? Can I be full of joy and hope while I wait?

I think that that is the purpose of waiting – to change us. To shift the locus of our hope from something to Someone. To shift our dependence from self to God. To shift us from natural discernment to spiritual discernment.

If our hope and trust is in Jesus, we will never be disappointed. Because He always turns up, just not always how and when we want Him to. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s better!

Copyright 2025, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.