It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

"In the air, there's a feeling of Christmas"

Kind of makes you wonder what all the hub-bub is about.

Yesterday I made my annual pilgrimage out to the local malls and shops to do some Christmas shopping. And try not to laugh, but I actually like shopping at Christmas time. At no other time of the year can Michele even come close to getting me excited to want to go shopping. But, come Christmas time, I go with her when I need to and I always make one trip on my own.

As I said, last night I ended up not getting home until nearly 10 after shopping 2 malls, a couple other strip mall locations, and a Meijer. And I enjoyed it...all of it. As I wrote the same thing this time last year, I love everything about Christmas. And I thing it has something to do with the fact that Christmas never changes. Same decorations, same songs, same story, etc. But I got to thinking yesterday about all of this.....

What's the big deal?

Trees all over the world, wreaths on doors, whole neighborhoods full off lights.

What’s the deal? It’s just a birthday right?

Christmas is more than just a day that Santa supposedly comes and it’s more than the day we max out our credit cards. It’s a day set aside each year to celebrate the birth of our King and Messiah Jesus Christ. We celebrate him because he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is the greatest man that has ever been and still is the greatest man that has ever been. In fact he is so powerful that he was born of a virgin and lived a perfect and sinless life, teaching of his Kingdom, using stories to explain that Kingdom and how it works. And then he did the ultimate thing. He was beaten and flogged for us. Nailed to a cross, gasping for breath and of a broken heart, breathed his last breath and died for our sins. And of course, 3 days later, rose from the dead declaring himself both Savior and God for all of eternity. Because of that he is available to us today. The Bible says whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

That’s why there are wreaths hanging around. That’s why we have Christmas trees. That’s why we have carols. That’s what the hub-bub is about.

And when you compare our hub-bub nowadays to this miracle, how does it measure up? How does all the pomp and circumstance and energy exerted nowadays compare to the same of the original day? Specifically, to the Sheppards response on the actual day?

Of all the people in the Christmas story, the sheppards are probably the most like us. Normal blue-collar people who we know very little about. We don’t know their names or where they are from or even exactly what it was they were doing in the field (watching over their flocks…what does that mean). Kind of like us.

But God interrupts all that normal and mundane. A heavenly host, the glory of the Lord all around in the middle of the night. The deep, dark midnight sky fully bright and fully alive with the same glory that Moses had to hide his face from.

BOOM!!!!

There it is.

What did they do with it?

They were told all this truth, but did not sit around in the field and just talk about and converse about these deep spiritual truths that the angels told them. And that happens a lot at Christmas. The theology is extremely important in the Christmas season. 100% God and 100% man and both are necessary for salvation. But we can talk about Christmas in such deep ways that we don’t really experience it too much. We get too wrapped in the teaching about.

Just the same we can make it too much of a pageant. Dress up in costumes and turn on all kinds of twinkling lights. But the Sheppard’s didn’t really pull out some wreaths and garland in celebration. One Sheppard didn’t reach down, pull of his sock and tell everyone his crazy idea of hanging that sock from a fireplace and having some fat old elf stuff it full of toys. That’s not what they did.

What they did, is get up from where they were and went to the party of Jesus birth. Quite the invitation!!

They got up and went and saw it with their own eyes. And the Bible says when they saw it, they went out telling EVERYBODY what they saw. We have carols that we sing to tell everyone about the fact that the sheppards went and told everyone what they saw at the party. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have gone to the party? Wouldn't it be cool if we told EVERYBODY about the invitation we've all been given?