In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . . merry Christmas.
Welcome, and thank you for coming this evening. We are grateful to have the opportunity to share our Christmas celebrations with you.
What is Christmas about? What is the point of the whole thing? We don’t want to make the mistake of assuming too much in our celebrations, in such a way that outsiders are left guessing about what the point might be. That would be rude, and Christmas is no time for such rudeness.
The first Christmas occurred in a world that was governed by death. This death had gained authority over all things because of the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in which we all have sadly participated. Because God is perfectly holy, nothing unholy can have fellowship with Him, and must necessarily be separated from Him. Because the human race became unholy in this sin, the whole human race was at that time separated from the fellowship with God that we had previously enjoyed. That separation from His life is what the Bible calls death. Just as an electric appliance that is separated from the socket in the wall is dead, so also we all, separated from His life, became dead. We did not cease to exist, but we ceased to run in the way that we were designed to run.
So sin is the condition of being unlike God, and death is what we call the natural ensuing separation from Him. In that sorry condition, most people struggle along to conduct their affairs. They are, as St. Paul says, “without God and without hope in the world” (Eph. 2:12). The apostle also teaches us that our way of “life,” which seems so natural to us, is actually a way of constant and unrelenting death (Eph. 2:1-5).
If we want evidence of this condition of death, we need look no further than our own hearts—our petty gripes, our selfishness, our lusts, our hypocrisies, our vainglorious competitions with others, our covetousness, our envy, and so on. God is not like that, and I am afraid that we are.
Stuck as we are in this condition, we cannot lift ourselves out of it. Appliances that are unplugged have no power at all—and therefore have no power to plug themselves back into the wall. We can’t fix our own problem, and we cannot even prepare ourselves to be fixed.
So this life, this power, that we have been separated from, is something we have no power to get back to. That means that if we and this life are to be reunited, that life must come to us—we cannot go to it, or, as I should say it, we cannot go to Him. We are unholy and powerless, and so we cannot ascend up into Heaven. But this limitation of ours is not a limitation of His. We cannot ascend to Heaven, but Heaven can descend to us. And that is exactly what Heaven decided to do. If we cannot go up, the Lord Himself will come down.
Jesus, the Son of God, who is the embodiment of life itself, became a man. This stupefying event, this miracle of miracles, is what we celebrate every Christmas. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the Incarnate Deity, pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Immanuel.” Immanuel means God with us. Please note that it does not mean “us with God.” Before we can be with God, God must be with us. Before man can go up, God must come down.
But Jesus did not become a man just in order to find out what it was like down here. He did not come down just for the experience. He wasn’t slumming it, and He was not here as a tourist. Jesus took on a body like ours, so that He would be able to die. The experience of death was not possible in Heaven, and so Jesus took on a mortal body here so that He could taste death here. He did this so that we could, if joined to Him in faith, die along with Him. Now here is the glorious secret—if we die in Him, that means we are dying to the condition of death that surrounds us on every hand. And dying to death means . . . life. Where does death go when it dies? If death could ever die, it would live forever.
So Jesus did not die so that we wouldn’t have to. Jesus died so that we might die in a particular kind of way. That “way” includes the prospect of resurrection. Jesus died and rose so that we could, by faith, die and rise in Him. Outside of Jesus, our condition of death is nothing but an endless spiral downwards, into the pit that has no bottom. But in Jesus, death is a once-for-all definitive event, and it is followed immediately by a life that is eternal, endless, and everlasting. It is followed by glory.
Now I have said several times that we are joined to this dying and rising of Jesus by faith. What does that mean? What does that look like? It means listening to a message like this one, and it means believing it down to the roots of your soul. It means accepting this message as a truth tailored just for you. It means identifying with Jesus through the sign that He appointed, which is baptism with water. If you are already baptized, it means trusting Him to restore your baptism, and if you are not baptized, it means coming to Him humbly, asking Him to wash all your sins away. It means that you are “all in.” It means you have become a Christian.
Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. This was in view from the very beginning. We are not dragging Good Friday and Easter into our Christmas celebrations. Christmas is the foundation of all that follows.
And so, just as we welcomed you warmly to this Christmas Eve service, so we also warmly invite you to Jesus Christ Himself. He is the way, the truth and the life. He is the death and resurrection. He is the beginning and end of all things. He is Heaven and earth reunited. He is the salvation that the prophets told us about from ancient times. He is the only way out of death. He is the only way that death can ever die. He is the Savior of the world, the one who takes away all the sins of the world. All of that is offered to you.
Every Christmas we are privileged to lift Him higher, and every Christmas we invite the ends of the earth to look to Him and be saved. Every Christmas we are gratified to see that more of the world has in fact emerged from its long night of death. You are invited to come with us as well. Come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.