How do you celebrate Christmas? A study done by the Pew
Forum last year indicated that 86% of Americans gather with extended family or
friends on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day; the same percentage buy gifts for
family and friends. Meanwhile 79% of Americans put up a Christmas tree, 65%
send Christmas cards; and only 54% attend religious services on Christmas Eve
or Christmas Day. So, to paraphrase an airline flight attendant, we know you
have many options when it comes to celebrating Christmas, so we want to thank
you for choosing to celebrate it with us.
If you wanted to be more creative, you could adopt some more
unusual customs that are practiced elsewhere in the world. According to a 2010
article from Travel and Leisure’s
website, in Guatemala ,
the devil is burned in effigy on a bonfire. In Japan , eating at KFC for Christmas
is so popular that some locations require reservations. In Wales , friends go from home to home
singing, accompanied by someone dressed up as a dead horse.[1] Or
maybe you are like Ebenezer Scrooge, who sternly rebuked his gracious nephew,
saying, “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine!”
Undoubtedly your family has its own Christmas customs, as
does mine. But if we really want to know how to celebrate Christmas, we need to
look no further than the passage of Scripture which has just been read, Luke 2:1-20.Here in the first Christmas, we find examples of the best ways for us
to honor Christ and celebrate His birth in our Christmases! After the angel
announced the good news of the Savior who had been born in Bethlehem , and the angelic host erupted in a
song of cosmic praise, the shepherds, and those they encountered, celebrated
the coming of Christ into the world in ways that we would do well to emulate!
I. Come and behold Christ the Lord! (vv15-16)
In the familiar song, “O Come All Ye Faithful,” we sing the
familiar words, “Come and behold Him, born the King of Angels! O come let us
adore Him, o come let us adore Him, o come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!”
As we sing those words, we are giving voice to the ancient shepherds who heard
the angelic announcement. While they were out in the fields with their flocks,
the angel appeared and said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you
good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city
of David there has been born for you
a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign for you; you will find a
baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” This was more than an
announcement of good news, it was an invitation to come and meet this Child and
behold Him for themselves.
Notice what the shepherds did. They said to one another,
“Let us go straight to Bethlehem
then, and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to
us.” And we read that “they came in a hurry and found their way to Mary and
Joseph and the baby as He lay in the manger.” How else should we respond to the
good news, the Gospel, that a Savior has been born for us? We, who are separated from God by our sins, have been
invited to come and meet the One who was born to take away our sins. The Christ
of Christmas’s manger is the Christ of Easter’s cross. This baby would grow to
live a life of perfect righteousness, completely free from sin, and He would
die to be our substitute, so that in Him our sins can receive the full penalty
they deserve under the holy justice of God. He takes our sins, and He offers us
His righteousness in exchange. This is how He becomes our Savior, as we turn
from our sins in repentance and claim Him by faith as our Lord, trusting Him to
save us and reconcile us to God. You have heard the good news – a Savior has
been born for you. Have you come to behold Him by faith for yourself, and call
upon Him to save you? If not, then this is the best of all possible ways to
celebrate Christmas – to receive Christ as the gift of Heaven given to you as
your Savior to rescue you from sin and reconcile you to God.
II. Go and tell the good news to others (v17)
These shepherds had a story to tell! They had seen and met
the Savior! God had become a human being in the person of Jesus the Christ, and
they had just seen Him with their own eyes! They had to tell others what had
happened to them. The Bible says, “When they had seen this, they made known the
statement which had been told them about this Child.” As James Montgomery Boice
said, “If their story was not worth telling, then no story that has ever been
told is worth telling.”[2]
Not only did they have a story to tell, they knew that other
people needed to hear this news as well. They needed to know that a Savior had
been born so that they could have hope and peace with God as well! These
shepherds knew that they lived in a world filled with people who were lost,
confused, and dying. Their world was no different than ours. All around us are
multitudes who are, in the words of Ephesians 2:12, without hope and without
God in the world. Lost, confused, dying, and separated from God the Father –
this is the universal human condition. But Jesus had come to be the Way, the
Truth, and the Life, that we might come to the Father by faith in Him (John
14:6). People who are lost need to find the way. Jesus is the Way! People who
are confused need to find the truth, and Jesus is the Truth! People who are
dying need to find life, and Jesus is the Life, and He said that no one comes
to the Father but by Him. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all of us who have
met Jesus and trusted Him as our Lord to proclaim to others that all of their
desperate longings can be satisfied eternally in this Savior who has been born for
them. We who have met Christ can celebrate His birth by announcing the good
news to a world that needs to hear it!
III. Hear the good news with wonder (v18)
During the Christmas season, we have the good news presented
to us in a variety of ways. There are the songs that sing of Christ’s birth.
Christmas cards express Christian messages of faith, hope, and love. Our hearts
are warmed every time we hear Linus tell Charlie Brown what Christmas is all
about. We hear these things, but do we hear it with wonder? The Bible says that
those who heard what the shepherds were saying “wondered.”
You know how your ears can become to dull to sounds you hear
over and over again. Our house is right under the flight path of jets taking
off at PTI. Nine years ago, it kept us up at night. Today we hardly notice it.
But when someone visits our home for the first time and hears it, they wonder
if we are under attack or something. They are amazed that we don’t even notice
it. I suppose for some, the Christmas story is kind of like that. We have lost
our sense of wonder at it. But if we would celebrate Christmas in the right
kind of way, we would chase after that sense of wonder and never let it out of
our grasp. How can we “get used to” or “get over” this astounding news of the
grace of God? How we grow dull and merely yawn at the message that God has
become one of us and come to save us? Perhaps we need to pray and ask God to
help us recapture the wonder and amazement of the miracle of Christmas that
this Savior has come. That would be a good way to celebrate Christmas – to
revel in wonder, and to ask the Lord to multiply that wonder exponentially in
our souls, as we hear the glad tidings that Christ the Lord has been born to
save us!
IV. Treasure the good news and ponder it (v19)
Around my office, I have many things that I treasure.
There’s a sculpture that my grandfather made, pictures of my kids, and pictures
they have drawn, pictures of my wife and my friends, objects I have brought
back from my travels, and so on. And within all of our hearts, we have similar
kinds of treasures. Memories of magical moments when we wished that time could
just stand still. We cherish them and cling to them, pulling them to the
forefronts of our minds just to behold them for a minute and smile. The Bible
says that Mary treasured this moment, when all of these things were occurring
around her – the birth of her child, the visit of the shepherds, the stories
they told of angels who had visited them, and the memories of her own visitation
from an angel who announced God’s plan for her to bear this child. These
things, and many more, “all these things,” Mary treasured and pondered in her
heart. To “ponder” is to reflect meditatively. When one is pondering, he or she
is thinking intently about something, piecing it together like a puzzle, and
tying together the strings of understanding and meaning. Mary was connecting
dots in her mind, reflecting on God’s mercy and grace to her, and considering
all that the birth of this child meant to her, and what it would mean to the
whole world.
This is how we are to celebrate Christmas. We are to take
the truths of God’s word as treasures into our hearts and ponder them. We are
to take “all these things” in: the promises and prophecies that foretold the birth
of the Savior, and the narrative accounts of how it came to pass, and the Gospel
truths that proclaim the salvation that Jesus was born to bring us. We ponder
them, reflecting meditatively upon them. We ponder the moment when these things
became real to us personally, that moment when we first turned to Christ in
faith and trusted in Him to save us. We ponder how His grace has worked within
us since that day. We ponder the promise of heaven and the hope of eternity
spent in God’s presence, all because this Savior has been born for us! We
ponder the miracle, and we ponder the mystery, and we ask the Lord to deepen
our understanding and sharpen our affection and adoration for Him as we
rehearse these treasures in our hearts and minds. It would be a wasted
Christmas if we take in all the customs and traditions and do not spend time
pondering the treasures of who Christ is and what it is that He has done for
us, is doing in and through us, and will do with us forever. Though there is
much perhaps that we do not understand, we cling to Him by faith, and ask Him
to enlarge our faith into understanding, and to do so evermore until our faith
becomes sight and we behold Him face to face.
And then finally, we can celebrate Christmas as we …
V. Go back with glory and praise to God for the gift of the
Lord Jesus
Verse 20 says that the shepherds went back – back to their
fields, back to their flocks – but they went back as changed men. They went
back glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen. They
were caught up in the worship of God-in-Christ.
There have been many popular Christmas songs over the years
that asked why the special feeling of Christmas can’t last all year long. Maybe
you have wondered the same. Within a few days, the presents will all be
unwrapped and put away, the tree will come down, and we will go back. For some
who are here visiting family and friends, you will go back home. For those who
have enjoyed a few days off, you will go back to work. We have to go back. But
we do not have to go back the same. If we have truly celebrated Christmas – if
we have beheld Christ, if we have told the story, and heard it afresh with
wonder, if we have treasured these things and ponder them in our hearts, we can
go back praising and glorifying God for all that we have heard and seen
concerning this Lord Jesus who was born to save us. We can go back with a fresh
commitment to worship the Lord Jesus every day, and to serve Him with gladness,
filled with His Spirit and with songs of praise in our hearts. Then we will
know that we have really celebrated Christmas, and the amazing thing is that
everyone we meet will know it as well. And perchance, as we explain to them how
we have celebrated Christmas, they may come to celebrate it in this true way as
well.
Richard Walters gave me a copy of a wonderful prayer a few
days ago, and I think it captures my own sentiments and my prayer for us all as
I bring this message to a close:
May you be filled with the wonder of Mary, the
obedience of Joseph, the joy of the angels, the eagerness of the shepherds, the
determination of the magi, and the peace of the Christ Child!
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