Christmas Part 2

December 25, 2006

Celebration is not unique to Christmas. Others celebrate at the end of the month of fasting. Others at their New Year with the dragon dance, and so on. It seems that ALL major celebrations involve to varying degrees, food, noise, lights, family reunion, gift-giving and decorations. So what is so special about Christmas?

Most people around here when pressed will tell you that Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ birth. And why is that so special? He came to save us from our sins.

But that’s where a lot of people now days get kind of confused. It’s not popular to talk about sin anymore. We all make mistakes, we have “issues” or “hang-ups” or problems. Most people see themselves as pretty good and not really sinners – that’s for the criminal types that commit murder, hurt children, rob, or oppress their people. We try to be good, most of the time, and after all nobody’s perfect. We compare ourselves with others and can always find somebody else who’s messing up worse than we are and so we assure ourselves that we’re not so bad. So really, what do we need a savior for?

What we forget though, is that God has revealed a coming day of judgment and He isn’t grading on a curve. God is not a post-modernist. From His perspective, man is NOT the measure of all things – He is.

The prophet Jeremiah said that the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick, who can understand it? The prophet Isaiah said that all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment. The apostle Paul said that nothing good lived in him, that is, in his sinful nature. For though he had the desire to do what is good, he could not carry it out. What he did was not the good he wanted to do but rather the evil he did not want to do—and he kept on doing it. He found this law at work: when he wanted to do good, evil was right there with him. In his inner being he delighted in God's law; but he saw another law at work in the members of his body waging war against the law of his mind and making him a prisoner of the law of sin What a wretched man he was! Who would rescue him from this body of death?

This sums up man’s dilemma. He doesn’t measure up. Especially since the measure is God, not man. And no matter how he tries, he can’t measure up, the evil is always there even in the midst of the good he tries to do. And what’s worse, his heart is so deceitful that he’s often not even aware of the evil he is doing. That’s pretty bad news.

But that bad news is precisely what makes the birth of a savior such GOOD news. Think about it.

"Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord."

Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!