I Believe that most people today have absolutely no clue what Christmas is all about.
No, I am not talking about the people running around getting presents and making nice to each other… No that is part of the secular holiday and to be honest what we should be doing anyway.
I hear a lot about the “real meaning” of Christmas… and by far I imagine what they mean by that is that we are celebrating Christ’s birth. The as of late fashionable “Keep Christ in Christmas theme gets to this.
Detractors don’t have it either
On the other hand, we have the detractors who make silly claims that Christmas was just made up to cover pagan holidays. It wasn’t…. Christmas already was long before most of those supposed “pagan” holidays came in the 3rd and 4th centuries. But these are all distractions.
This year, like many of the years I have seen… I hear people feeling sad around the holidays. They say they always liked the holiday season before but this year it feels not happy. Well okay you are not feeling happy. There are times when I do not feel happy. As a matter of fact, right now I am not feeling happy…. But that is okay… The world says you must feel happy… Well I know better… We don’t have to feel anything…. We can feel happy, sad, rancorous, maybe even fearful. But that has nothing to do with the season of the year. It is simply how you feel right now. And it is okay. We are billions of individuals here and we each feel differently on any given moment.
It’s not about the words
You see, the real purpose of Christmas is not how we feel. It is not what we think… it is not the words we parrot from Billy Graham, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Hawkins, it is not about theories by Nietzsche, Jung, or Freud. It is not the words we read in Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, or Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.
For you see God loves each and every one of us. This is the point. God created all that we see and all that we know. Most people seem to agree upon the Big bang as how this universe started. But however it began the prime mover was indeed God. And the God who made this loves us. But Love is a touchy subject. Many of the people who were supposed to love us… hurt or failed us. And we hold onto these hurts and failures and make that “feeling we have” what love is about. That is not love… that is the effect of someone sinning. Some sins hurt ourselves and it hurts our perception of love. Some sins hurt another and it hurts their perception… And to make matters worse… we then try to justify ourselves by condemning the other person… which hurts our perception of love… and it goes in a circle.
Reality of God
But then there is God. He loves us truly as we should love. He loves us more than anything we could ever know in this lifetime. We might get close… but during this life there is still the separation from the one thing we desire… and that is unity with Him. So he showed us himself, Through a man and a woman. They were deceived into wanting more than God. And we have been deceived since the fall of mankind. But throughout the ages we have been given signs of God’s love to us. The burning bush of Moses, The flight through the Red Sea, the Kings, the prophets, the Priests of the Temple.
And then the ultimate gift and showing of His love… God came down from his Kingdom and trod upon the earth. Showing us by His very self the Truth of what he has been talking about for thousands of years and he was born of a Virgin in the city of Bethlehem. God has touched this earth and walked on its soil, its rocks, and in its waters. That is how much He loved us. Jesus is God Jesus is the ultimate Gift that can be given to each of us. We can reject Him but we should accept this gift and we should love God back. He doesn’t ask much… never has and never will.
Be good, Play nice, Think God!