The Christmas season is full of stories.
Some of them are fun. Others are silly, forgettable. Still others are sobering.
The best stories are about reconciliation. People coming back together after days, months, years of regrettable and destructive fighting. The famous Christmas truce days of WWI in Europe (1914) rank as one of the best. This year those brief days of "peace on earth" are a century old, and rightly remembered. Men in the killing fields emerged from opposing bunkers dug into mud and stench to stand with their enemies for moments of encouragement, blessing, sharing pictures of family, spirits...and a respite from the slaughter.
The truths of the birth of Christ, or what we popularly call "Christmas," produce such peace and giving. Pare away the tinsel, overspending, and hectic preparations, and Christmas is actually about God giving His Son. More specifically, God the Son coming into the world through the agency and power of God the Holy Spirit in order to do the reconciling work and plan of God the Father.
"God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (2 Corinthians 5).
An unholy mankind has, through the centuries of history ,been at war with himself and with the Holy God who created him. Adam ran from God and hid when sin crippled his heart, his marriage, and his world. God had to come seeking, looking, calling. Unholiness produces everything we hate in ourselves and in this world. Yet by ourselves, without God's seeking and intervening help, we are virtually powerless to extract the moral cancer from our bones.
Christmas is about a God who sent His Son into the sinful, stench-filled bunkers of humanity, to bring us out. He chose to die so that those who simply believe do not need die themselves. When Christ died, and rose again, the intractable war between an unholy man and a holy God could be over. Men could be forgiven, and reconciled to the God who created them.
"God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (2 Corinthians 5).
At our Christmas eve services at Christ Community Church, we offered a simple copy of the New Testament Scriptures to all of our visitors, with a Christmas day devotional tucked inside. A devotional which simply leads through God giving of His Son in love, and the possibility of reconciliation and the gift of life eternal.
Two Chinese students came and each took a Bible. One simply said, "I've never had a Bible," and then asked her host, "Why do you read this?"
What a wonderful question.
We read this -- and invite you to do the same -- to clearly and fully understand the greatest story that ever happened in Human History. That God became a man. For a reason. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Calling us out of our deeply dug bunkers, up and out of sin, to be forgiven and called into peace with God.
The only Christmas story that really matters.
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