When I was a boy, Christmas at our home was a beautiful thing, yet there weren’t many presents. My father was a preacher and received a yearly salary of $1,000. One year my brother and I wanted a bicycle. We told our parents about it for months on end and wrote letters to Santa Claus. We got the bicycle, all right–a secondhand one. But I can remember still the thrill of riding it up and down Gilman Avenue that day.
The gifts you receive–modest or elaborate–are important only to the degree they help you experience something of what Christmas really is. Which is what? It is a spiritual observance of the birth of Jesus Christ into the stream of history and into the soul of man. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). That, in a nutshell, is Christmas.
The first thing Christmas means, of course, is that God is with us. Isaiah prophesied of Jesus that He would be called Immanuel, meaning “God with us.” In Jesus, God incarnate in human form walked the earth as a man.
Strange are the ways of God! Born in a little out-of-the-way country into a family of poor people, Jesus was first seen as an infant lying in a manger. And when He curled his fingers around the rough old hands of the shepherds, He began to win His way into the human heart. The Wise Men, looking for wisdom greater than their own, were led to Him and bowed before Him, a little baby.
When they looked into the eyes of this baby, they knew that here was wisdom incarnate. How did they know it? How do you know the deeper truths? By argument? By reasoning? By philosophy? No, by perception, insight, intuition, understanding. After a while Jesus came to the end of His human life; He ascended into heaven, but He left the Holy Spirit with us. He said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).
God is in this world. God wants to be in your heart. Until we have a conscious experience of God we never really live. And until you know He is here you are a long way from the true Christmas.
How can we have a conscious experience of God? I can give you a suggestion: Go out in a spirit of love and do something for somebody who is in need. Jesus said, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me” (Matthew 25:40). Where human need is you have the best chance of finding Him. So long as you are thinking only about yourself you won’t find Him. But if you love other people and engage in sacrificial service you will find Him… and you will have a very merry Christmas indeed.
