What did you get for Christmas this year? Was it exactly what you wanted or have you spent some quality time standing in line this past week at the customer service desk hoping to exchange some things?

Here's the question I've been dealing with. What should it tell me that it's taking less and less to get me excited at Christmas each year? Aside from some Bose headphones to use with my hand-me-down I-pod, Nancy bought me a couple of pairs of socks and some new house shoes and I actually got excited. What's really scary is that I had asked for those specific gifts. I used to make jokes about socks and house shoes as Christmas gifts and now, I suppose, the joke's on me.

I'll admit that my taste in socks has changed over the years. I'm pretty picky about what brand and all that, Gold Toe over the calf size big, in case you're wondering. Does that just tell me that I'm getting older or does it tell me something else? Is there any chance that after all these years of talking about Jesus and valuing what is eternal more than temporal that my tastes may actually be changing, as though I'm beginning to listen to my own preaching?

After a run-in with a life-threatening disease, a car wreck, the loss of loved one or standing outside the ruins of storm-ravaged home, you almost always hear someone say to the reporter shoving a microphone in their face, "It only served to make me realize what matters most in life." The real challenge is to figure that all out when life is good and you've already got so much stuff that when your wife asks you what you want for Christmas you say, "Oh, a couple of pairs of Gold Toes would be nice."

It wouldn't be exactly accurate to say that life was particularly good for the apostle Paul. His last years weren't spent in a gated retirement community but mostly behind the gates of a prison. He had lots of time on his hands to assess what he valued most. Having done the life math, this is what he said. "Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." It was his profit and loss statement. What's yours? What matters most to you and what do you consider worth very little? Could we honestly say what Paul said?

In the verses just prior to those we've read this morning, Paul confessed that he had done virtually everything expected of a good Jew and then some. He'd spent the bulk of his life getting to a place those whose opinion mattered most to him would approve of. Now, he says, none of that matters anymore. Was he just getting older, or, had something else happened? We'll get back to that in just a minute.

Just yesterday I had lunch with a twenty-six year-old young man who called me this past week. He doesn't go to church here, or anywhere, for that matter, and he is so disconnected from this church that the chances of him knowing I even told this story are virtually non-existent. Even if I named him, no one in this church would know him. It wouldn't surprise me if, like half of Dallas, his grandparents were born into this church eighty years ago and were baptized and married by Dr. Bassett. He called me because a friend of his referred him to me. I met him in North Dallas at a Mexican food restaurant where they sell food they only wish was half as good as what we get right down the street, on this side of the river.

He called because he's in trouble with his girlfriend. They've been living together now for about a year and half, supposedly saving enough money to someday get married. That had me curious from the beginning. Who saves money to get married? I thought you got married because you were broke and needed the extra income. Anyway, it turns out that what he is actually saving for is the two-karat diamond engagement ring she has asked for because her best girlfriend already has one and she doesn't want to look bad standing at the altar. He's scratching his head, as well he should be. He's wondering where he stands in the karat-pecking order, in front of or behind the ring. I actually encouraged him to think about that.

As we talked, it turns out that both he and his girlfriend were raised in the church. Fine, upstanding families all around. Later, when it was the right time, I got to ask him the values question. Is it possible, I asked him, that though he was raised in the church, the values the church represents weren't really his? Is it possible that, though he'd been raised in church, that the values the church professes are not the values he possesses? That the Jesus to which the church witness is not the Jesus he knows personally. We left that question hanging and I'm praying for the chance to get back to it soon. What about you? Are the values this church espouses and the values you possess the same?

It's the first of January. Even if a tornado hasn't ravaged your home or you haven't been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, it's a great time to do a profit and loss assessment. Are you spending the best asset you'll ever have, your life, on things that you think will matter, at least things everyone else tells you should matter, or on a relationship that will always matter even after the things you thought you owned turned out to have just been borrowed for a few decades?

Every time I go to the nursing home, I'm amazed at how all those things those dear people worked for all their lives have been reduced to have been reduced to a chest of drawers beside their bed. The people in the nursing homes don't want more things. All they really want is someone to talk to.

In the end, it all comes down to relationships. Just like the people who've lost every thing say, it's the relationships that stay with you after the storm has passed that make living through the storm and life after the storm worth living. That's all Paul was saying. He counted every thing he once thought of as profit, like how he appeared to those whose opinion seemed to matter most at the time, as nothing but loss compared to one sacred relationship. "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection . . .."

Ponder this reflection written about this time of year. "Christmas is a season of such infinite labour, as well as expense in the shopping and present-making line, that almost every woman I know is good for nothing in purse and person for a month afterwards." What's really interesting is Anna Quindlen, a Newsweek columnist who recently wrote those words, was quoting a British writer who originally wrote them in 1874! Quindlen goes on to write, about Christmas gifts, the "the essence of the season lies in figuring out what is passing minutiae and what is enduring memory. That may be the essence of everything" (Anna Quindlen, "The Time Machine," Newsweek, December 25, 2006). She's spot on! Time passes; not much changes. Unless, unless, proactively, future-tense oriented, we make a choice to do a profit and loss assessment. It was a personal encounter with the risen Christ that changed Paul's assessment of what mattered most and what didn't.