What Christmas Means.

Sure, Christmas can be a wonderful time of getting together with family and friends. Sure, it can be a time for generosity, hospitality, peace and goodwill to come to the fore. However, regardless of how noble and excellent those reasons might be, they don’t even come close to capturing the true meaning of Christmas. Take a look to see if you’re celebrations capture the essence of the season.

• Christmas means God exists.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 14)

• Christmas means God does not exist as an aloof, impersonal, insensitive, uncaring Deity, but a God who is sympathetic, personal, sensitive and compassionate.

By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. (1 John 4:9)

God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. (John 3:17)

• Christmas means the intervention of God to save man owing to the default spiritual state of man — deadness — because of which man is utterly unable to save himself.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) (Ephesians 2:4-5)

• Christmas means God’s desire for reconciliation with mankind. Which implies that in their natural state, men aren’t actually in a relationship with God but are actually hostile towards Him! it also means that God will go to any lengths to achieve this reconciliation. Even if it means sacrificing His own Son.

God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them (2 Corinthians 5:19)

although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach (Colossians 1:21,22)

• Christmas means good news because God has sent His own Son as an ambassador to bring about reconciliation between Himself and men.

Once were not a people, but now you are the people of god; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Peter 2:10)

• Christmas means reconciliation with God can only be achieved in God’s way i.e. through repentance and faith in His Son Jesus Christ.

having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent. (Acts 17:30)

… there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:12)

• Christmas means God can be trusted to do the right thing for us, at the right time, to produce outcomes that we could never dream of.

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. (Galatians 4:4-5)

• Christmas means God is a God of humility who leads by example.

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8)

• Christmas means God’s love is not a soppy, sentimental love, but a sacrificial kind of love.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

• Christmas means we can have the assurance — right here, right now — that we know God.

By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him (1 John 2:3-5)

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God (1 John 4:2-3)

• Christmas means we have a responsibility to God, our Creator.

Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2)