Holidays - Seasons Greetings!

Christmas is empty and void of meaning unless we can experience it in the present tense. So often our lives are paralyzed because we fail to see that the Unfolding Drama of Christmas is an everpresent one. With the whole world as a stage, God comes again and again to bring light and life to men. Daily He yearns to be born within our hearts. All too often our hearts and minds are unreceptive because we are living in the past. God invites us to join Destiny’s march, but we clutch the past. He invites us to adventure; He offers to fill our days with the dimensions of eternity; He offers to make us actors in this greatest of dramas, but we choose to ignore His coming, because we are still living in the past.

Christmas, for many, is an event which took place almost two thousand years ago, and there it ends. They have tended to make an idol of the manger, so much so that they are insensitive to God’s coming to the human heart here and now. Carl G. Howie, in his book “God in the Eternal Present”, sets the record straight. He maintains that God is active right now in each of our lives:

If we do not hear Him speaking it is not because God is silent, but because we are not listening.

For these, Christmas is past tense, never present. Perhaps this is the reason that in this twentieth century, the masses are saying that God is dead. Even some theologians are saying that God is dead. One is tempted to ask “Which god”? If you mean that god of the upper class or the god of a superior white race, or the god of the allies only, then we would agree with the radical young theologians, for these gods are ugly idols, created by selfish men to further their own selfish ends. These counterfeit gods are so different from the God who revealed Himself in the face of Jesus Christ.

The good news of the first Christmas was that Christ, the Son of God, was born in Bethlehem’s stable. The good news of Christmas now is that Christ yearns to be born in the human heart. Paul uses many terms to express this miracle. He speaks of “the indwelling Christ”; “the Christ that is within you”; “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me”.

Christ no longer offers to be with us, but to be within us.
His strength becomes our strength;
His love becomes our love;
His purposes become our purposes;
His peace becomes our peace; and
His will becomes our will.
This is the miracle of Christmas-present tense!

If Christ is not a living reality in your life; if the cradle of your heart is empty still, then what God did for the world on that first Christmas has been in vain, so far as you are concerned.

Though Christ a thousand times
In Bethlehem be born,
If He’s not born in thee
Thy soul is still forlorn.

The paramount fact is that Christ is born daily in the hearts of men, if we have eyes to see it. There are many of us who can testify to the change which has taken place after Christ invaded our lives. After a long, dark night of wrestling with a sin which had threatened to destroy us, the miracle happened, and Christ came into our lives and strengthened us to overcome our enemies, and live in harmony with God.

With Christ in the heart, we have discovered and are discovering the joy of that first Christmas breaking in upon us daily.

The Lord made no idle promise:

These things have I spoken to you, that my joy might be in you, and that your joy might be full. — John 15:11.

Tennyson beautifully describes King Arthur: “In the heart of Arthur joy was Lord”. In like manner we can say from experience, “In the heart of the Christian, joy is Lord”.

Just as Jesus comforted Martha and Mary when their brother died, so he is our Comforter in our hour of bereavement. It is a great comfort to know that, when Death’s golden chariot stops long enough to pick up a loved one, the driver has been sent by Heaven’s King. Jesus is still guide to every man who will follow him. “I am the way, the life and the truth” he said of himself (John 14:6.), and we of the Jesus Way have not found this to be an empty boast.

Pascal has said, “The heart has reason which reason knows not of”. We cannot prove with slide rule, or geiger counter, or an X-ray machine that Christ is born into our hearts, but we know of a certainty when it happens, and our whole life takes on a new dimension.

Henry Webb Farrington, is a few poetic lines, fittingly captures the mystery and the majesty of the Incarnation:

I know not how that Bethlehem’s Babe
Could in the Godhead be,
I only know the manger’s Child
Has brought God’s love to me,”

Every Christmas, not unlike the first, finds the world shrouded in the black clouds of war.

God gave to man a mind to explore and harness the natural resources of nature for the welfare of all mankind. In actual fact man is using this divine gift to build instruments of destruction.

There are, however, signs of hope on the international scene. We may well be standing on the threshold of a new day, when man “shall not hurt or destroy”. (Isaiah 11:9.) Last Christmas for thirty hours the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam was suspended in honour of the Prince of Peace. During that short time every man’s life was considered sacred, and no man lifted a hand to destroy what God had made. For thirty hours the Divine Monarch was allowed to govern the nations with love and goodwill. As we all know, this cease-fire was a short one, but let us pray and hope that these thirty hours of peace will be but a preview of a world at peace, not just for thirty hours but until the end of recorded time.

This Jesus who reprimanded an impetuous Peter for shearing an ear from a Roman soldier is the same Jesus who is moving men right now to seek peace throughout the earth. This same Jesus meets us in our present inadequacy, and promises strength for the arduous tasks of the day.

After seeing the musical production “The Black Nativity”, I shall never forget the rhythm and the words of one of the negro Christmas songs. With the conviction of one who knew from experience, the soloist reminded us that Christmas is in the present tense:

There’s nobody like the Lord,
There’s nobody like the Lord!
You can search the whole world over,
But you won’t find nobody like Him.

Let us take heart in the assurance that Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday.