It’s Christmas, and Atheists Are Sadder Than Ever!

[Stolen from his blog]

7 Things Christmas Confirms

[Transcript of a sermon preached at OBC on December 12th, 2010]

Shopping mall busyness and commercialism; fights with family members; stress from getting things “just right”; holiday traditions with empty meaning; relentless saccharine holiday specials on television and theatre screens; obligatory card writing and gift giving. Is this what Christmas is all about?  What about the story in that play we saw last year at that church, you know, the baby in a feeding trough thing…what’s so special about a baby’s birth? Babies are messy, and eventually they grow up. What’s to celebrate about a God who would be so tyrannical that he would have an unwed, pregnant, teenage girl as part of the whole thing?

The birth of Jesus brought joy and hope to a world where grief and pain were well-known by all. Joy was rare and seldom would last long. The announcement to the shepherds was not a disembodied wisp of religious emotion; rather it is a gladness that still resonates these 2000 years later. “Born this day in the city of David is a Saviour, which is the Christ, the LORD.”

We are told the true meaning of Christmas is “love, peace, just believing, family & Santa”. Jesus brings joy and hope to a world where grief and pain are well-known now! Celebrating the birth of Jesus, the visitation of God to earth, and not merely “love, family and Santa” will be the only method of pure peace, love, joy and hope ~ even validation ~ we will have. That is what this world really needs; not a season of empty humanistic celebration, [one can not even really know peace, love, joy and hope without Jesus] but hope and validation from its maker and God.

The fact that Jesus came, born to a woman, having no reputation, being found as a man, humbling Himself to die on a cross [Phil 2.8] so as to conquer sin and death! This is a fact so meaningful, so eloquent all the poet laureates of the world could not wholly describe it, nor all the theologians of the world fully explain it.

The birth of the Christ was not simply an event in the history of our world; there are several ways in which the incarnation rocked our world and has forever changed our past, present and future.

His coming told the world something; it declared something, confirmed something. What was it?

The great theologian A.W. Tozer has done an amazing job dissecting that something, and so I am indebted to him for much of what I share with you this morning. You see, that something is actually several things. Just as Jesus broke the loaves into pieces for greater convenience in eating them, let’s divide this something into parts in order to better understand them.

I. GOD IS REAL
There had been 400 long, quiet years between Malachi’s ending and Matthew’s beginning. The people were beginning to think God was done with them. Indeed, the heavens were opened and another world than this one came breaking in! “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth, peace, good will”.  The shepherds knew earth too well, but now they hear from God and heaven above ~ in one glorious moment the two worlds collide and there was joy! Now, God is no longer a hope, a might be ~ away with agnosticism! He is! He has made himself known!

What was available only for chosen elite, from Aaron’s line, was now manifest to common man! Such a happening only confirms …

II. HUMANITY HAS VALUE Phil. 2.7

Emerging the eternal word with human flesh redeems what was once thought dirty and base. It can not be so, or else God would not have chosen to join with it! He redeems our humanity by being one of us! While commenting on ‘the Shallow and Profound’, Oswald Chambers writes in his devotional work My Utmost for His Highest,

“Beware of posing as a profound person – God became a baby. To be shallow is not a sign of being sinful. Nor is shallowness an indication that there is no depth to your life at all – the ocean has a shore. Even the ‘shallow’ things of life, such as eating and drinking, walking and talking [even every human experience], are ordained by God. These are all things our Lord did. He did them as the Son of God.” [Matthew 10.24]

 Man’s creation imageo dei is positively confirmed as Jesus becomes fully man and fully God, existing in time and space truly as ‘one of us’ yet all the more whom we are to be.

Since God has redeemed our humanity by joining with it, we are loved indeed. There is not a need to fear that we are simply a step in evolution, but rather the champion of His creation. And being so, we know that …

III. HUMANKIND WILL NOT BE EXTERMINATED

That which was God seized upon that which was man. “God of the substance of the Father, begotten before all ages; Man of the substance of his mother, born in the world. Perfect God and Perfect man; though he be not two but one – the Christ! God did not visit our race to merely rescue it from Satan, but to show our race to be one that will last.  Surely we will not be wiped out by nuclear war or turned into subhuman monsters through radiation or ultimately change the genetic process through evolution or fast-food or natural disasters and global warming; Jesus would not have taken upon Himself the nature of a race soon to be extinct.

If we can count this having happened, if these claims can be confirmed, then we know that our faith is as old as creation and has been in the works since that time! Christmas confirms …

IV. GOD SPOKE THROUGH THE PROPHETS John 1. 1; Hebrews 1. 1-2; 1 Peter 1. 10-12

Priests and scribes well-versed in the scriptures told Herod that the Christ must come from Bethlehem in Judaea. Thereafter, the OT comes alive in Jesus! The likelihood of any one man validating himself as Messiah against so many prophecies, over so many years, from so many prophets, in so many areas and times is impossible unless it truly was intentional and of God!
His coming confirmed both the veracity of Old Testament scripture and the soundness of His own claims and actions.

Jesus coming as a baby was not the end. He came that he might die. In doing that, we can reason …

V. WE ARE LOST, BUT NOT ABANDONED GALATIANS 4. 4-7

Had we not been lost, we would not have needed a saviour; a guide to show us the way back.  If we had then been abandoned, no saviour would have come. But He came. This establishes that God has concern for us.  We might have sinned away every shred of merit, still he does not forsake us; He has descended so that we might ascend!

Yes, we can find our way back, but through anything we would do ourselves – Jesus is the way! In finding our way through Him, we have confidence that we were made for more; this is not all there is.

VI. THIS WORLD IS NOT THE END JOHN 14. 2

When He was here, Jesus spoke with cheerful certainty of the world to come. He reported on the things He had seen and knew were to come.  We are made not for this world, but for the one to come; as surely as we inhabit this one, we are sure to inhabit another.

So if this world is not it, if indeed our saviour God has come to rescue us, to give us value and hope, then we can lastly affirm that …

VII. DEATH WILL ONE DAY BE DETHRONED AND LIFE WILL RULE

Read I John 3. 8 and consider: What is the devil’s chief victory, if not convincing a great many people that he is not real nor a threat, but that he held us in sin and the grip of death? But now, life is made manifest by the appearing of our saviour Jesus who has abolished sin and death and has brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel. He has rescued us from our captor and sealed his doom!