Life of the Party

Spirituality Column #111
December 23, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Life of the Party
By Bob Walters

And the Word became flesh … John 1:14

Above everything else, Christmas is a celebration of life.

Almost everyone in our culture, believing Christian or not, figures out a way to celebrate this “Winter Holiday” even if they can’t figure out what to do with Jesus: the Christ Child, co-equal in the Holy Trinity with God the Father and the Holy Spirit.

We endure the tortured public rhetoric of political correctness – sure, sing a song in the school “Holiday” show that proclaims plainly “Christ the Savior is born,” but whatever you do … don’t call it a Christmas show – yet we all share the innate sense that there is something divinely special about us being alive.

God very obviously feels exactly the same way.

God came to us, through Jesus Christ, to save us. Yes, we are sinners and we needed to be saved in a way that we could not save ourselves – we cannot cure our own sin. But until we realize that God came because He loves us (John 3:16), not to punish us – Jesus, after all, is love – we cannot truly understand how very, very, very special this gift of life is.

Christ came because God knew we needed Him even though, as it says in John 1:10, “His own received Him not.” You can argue that “His own” refers to the Jews, since Jesus was in fact a Jew. But with the arrival of Christ, we all – Jew and Gentile – became “His own.”

Satan loves it when Christmas is about anything other than Christ. Satan – Mr. “Winter Holiday” – is the purveyor of death and darkness. In our God-given freedom, we find all kinds of ways to sin, to run from Christ and convince ourselves that dying with Satan through sin is better than living with God in light through Christ.

Do you get it? Satan equals Death. Christ equals Life … and Christ is the author of each of our lives because He, God, in fact became flesh like us.

That is the true meaning of Christmas.

The big deal at Christmas isn’t just that Jesus Christ is born, and born for everybody (again, see John 3:16).

The truly big deal at Christmas is accepting, believing and knowing that Jesus Christ is Life, Light and Lord.

Go tell that on a mountain.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wishes all a profoundly blessed and Merry Christmas. If you feel the magic, you feel Christ.