Do You Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day?
Anyone who knows me knows that I love Christmas, it’s my favourite time of the year. I love the magic and the sparkles, I love the opportunity to slow down and spend time with family, I love that everyone seems to be just a little bit kinder and yes, of course, I love the gifts. Who doesn’t enjoy pressies?
However, as we step into the closing weeks of our year-long exploration of “Jesus over everything” and I have the opportunity to introduce our advent theme, I was pondering what it might mean for Jesus to really be over everything during this holiday season.
His name is in the title of course so one might assume it would be impossible to enjoy Christmas without the Christ but in our postmodern, post-Christian age, we know that that would be a naive assumption.
As busy Christians it’s all too easy to get distracted by the commitments of day to day life, such that Jesus becomes relegated to an afterthought. And if that’s the case for us, we can hardly blame our pre-believing friends for forgetting about the baby in the manger!
So what’s the solution? How do ee allow Jesus to grow up and not keep Him in the manger? How can Jesus be for life and not just for Christmas?
I ask these questions for those of us who love Jesus. This isn’t for the purposes of metaphorically bashing the heads of the pre-believers in your life this Christmas season. They will be drawn to Jesus through how you show up in day to day life, how you love, how you navigate challenging seasons. You will be the only Jesus some people will allow into their lives - until they are wooed into relationship with the King of kings for themselves.
And that is why this conversation is so important, because a life empowered by Jesus is the only way to show up with love, grace and kindness when facing the most difficult things of life.
Yes, there are lots of very kind and good people in this world who don’t yet know Jesus, but the bible reminds us that “as a man thinks, so he is” or, to put it in El terminology, when you get knocked, what you’re really made of is going to come spilling out! If I knock my coffee cup, coffee spills out. When you knock me, who I really am deep at my core spills out. And the only way to spill out love, joy and peace is to be filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus’s gift to us before he left earth.
And that, ultimately, is why we cannot, must not, keep Jesus in the manger. If we refuse to recognise that the birth, we celebrate in December has a bigger purpose than just a nice excuse for a get together with friends and family members, we lose everything!
Yes, I know that sounds over-dramatic but, in the same way that you were born with a plan and a purpose on your life, this is also true for Jesus.
“But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.” — Galatians 4: 4
Jesus was born to die. He did an amazing job of healing the sick, forgiving sins, casting out demons and pointing people to God’s love but if he’d done all that and then hung up his coat and slipped off for a nice quiet retirement in the Galilean hills somewhere, it would have been game over!
To use a popular Doctor Who trope, Jesus’s death was a fixed point in time, it had to happen and yet, he still had a choice. He always had a choice, and he chose “not my will but your will be done”.
“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” - Ephesians 2:10
There is a plan and a purpose for your life, good things God planned for you to do, and you have a choice, you always have a choice.
You have a choice this advent season to step into each new day with God, echoing Jesus’s words “not my will but your will be done”. You have a choice to embrace the gift that is the Holy Spirit in your life, listening for His leading and guiding, moment by moment and day by day. You have a choice to step into your identity as a child of God, believing who your Heavenly Dad says you are and owning the reality of your adoption.
All of it is a choice and all of it is an invitation. And it’s that invitation I’m being nudged to leave you with to ponder on as you step into this advent season.
God has promised to never, ever leave you. Immanuel, God with us, is the promise of Christmas but He’s with you always, not just at Christmas - you don’t have to just wish it could be Christmas every day. With Jesus over everything, every day can be like Christmas in your heart.
“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” — 2 Corinthians 13:14
Merry Christmas!
#christmas #merrychristmas #christmaseverday