Christmas Message 2022

As tradition has it in the United States, Christmas is a time of gift giving, giving gifts to our family and friends, to people we love, and perhaps even to people we don’t know.

Giving brings out the true meaning of Christmas, because God started it all by giving mankind the most wonderful gift in the world.

John 3:16-17
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”

For Christians, Christmas marks the time when we celebrate the incarnation of Jesus, when Jesus left His throne in heaven to come down to earth and become one of us. Except that Jesus is 100% God and 100% man…. how He does that I don’t know, but only God could pull this off.

While Jesus walked the earth in His ministry, He gave of Himself all the time. Healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, bringing life back to dead arms and legs, and bringing people back from the dead.

Jesus was and is a gift giver.

Acts 20:35
“I have shown you in every way, by laboring like this, that you must support the weak. And remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Now if you search the gospels you will not find the place where Jesus said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.” The only place where we find it is here in the Book of Acts. So the only answer I can come up with is when Paul met with Jesus in the desert, Jesus must have said it to Paul, then Paul writes it down for us so that we would have it.

God the Father gave us His Son as a gift to us all.

At Christmas we reflect on the fact that the Father sent His Son to the earth. Jesus started out as a baby just like all of us do. After Jesus was born, some tried to kill the baby Jesus, but His heavenly Father protected Him from any harm. Crystal recently brought up a good question, at what age did Jesus realize that He was God in human flesh and His mission was to be our sacrifice? The earliest account we have is Jesus teaching in the synagogues at about 12 years old.

There’s a story about the reason why Jesus came to this earth. I’m sure many of you have heard it, but it’s so sweet and so sincere that it bears repeating. It’s called “The Man and the Birds” by Paul Harvey…

“Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce to you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. “I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm, and in a desperate search for shelter, they had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could just direct the birds to it. Quickly, he put on a coat, galoshes, and tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. Then he opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would maybe entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. So, he tried catching them, he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized, that the birds were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I’m a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any movement he made tended to frighten them, and confuse them. They just wouldn’t follow him. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. “If only I could become a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand me.

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells… listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.”

Jesus came to this earth to be one of us… not that He could relate to us better, but that we could relate to Him.

Heb. 4:14-16
“So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.”

This Christmas let’s celebrate Jesus’ coming down to us, that He came to seek us out and to save us. Jesus gave to us the sweetest gift ever, the gift of eternal life with Him in paradise forever. Maybe this year you can share this gift with someone else this season.