As many people I know enjoying a family holiday weekend, I realize that not everyone is working from the same understanding, that Christmas is a celebration of the coming of the Messiah, God’s one and only Son, and that His coming was the fulfillment of a promise that God made to save His people. The point, even more than the miraculous markers of Christ’s birth, is that God fulfilled a promise and that those who believe in that promise have come to possess an amazing hope.
Christmas is about far more than the miraculous birth of Jesus. It is about more than manger scenes or gifts delivered to this young boy from wise men who honored a small child as the king of the Jews.
Christmas is about a dark world that had not heard (prophetically) from God for centuries. It is about a people living in subjection to a government that was not oriented to God, but one that saw itself as a god or one of many gods. Christmas is about people living in darkness, starved for hope, doing the best they could…and God choosing to speak into that darkness with a message of hope. This hope is that you do not have to make up for all your errors. You do not have to correct every offense toward God. It is impossible to do so. But you do have to admit that you are in a mess that you cannot correct on your own.
Christmas is about God speaking hope into darkness. It is about God bringing life to the lifeless.
It is about God doing what no one else could and what He was never obligated to do except for, perhaps, His own self-obligation…His promise to save people from their sins. Christmas is about God’s fulfilled promise.
In a world given to protesting everything it doesn’t like about anything, I find it glorious that God did not protest mankind’s rebellion. He did not shut down the conversation, or ignore us. He did not yell at us or incessantly repeat the occasions of our failures. He came to save us. He loved us when, by all honest assessment, we were unlovely to Him. He did for us what we would never do for another. He did it with a magnified humility that should really give perspective on our boastfulness of life. He did so because, as His Word says, “He so loved us…the world…the people of His creative work.” (John 3:16).
So, Merry Christmas. Hope has come. Light shined into darkness and the darkness could not overwhelm the light.
That’s good news. That’s Christmas.
From Jodi and I, and on behalf of our entire family…Merry Christmas! Hope has come.
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