Celebrate Jesus…

[Clifford]

Christmas in the Garden

GENESIS 3:1-15

Santa Claus, Rudolph, Jack Frost, the Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge—all of these stories have become part of our modern celebration of Christmas. But most people, even those who don’t go to church regularly, could probably tell you that none of these is the real story of Christmas. Everyone knows that the Christmas story started 2000 years ago with the birth of Jesus, right? Actually, no! The story of Christmas actually starts at the beginning of the first book of the Bible, at the very beginning of human history, in a place about as far removed from our idea of a cozy and snowy Christmas setting as possible. The story of Christmas begins in a garden.

The Garden of Eden was as close to heaven on earth as a place could possibly be. The weather was perfect, the flowers never withered, and if there were wasps, they never stung anyone. Adam and Eve didn’t have to worry about hunger or animal attacks or splinters. They were at perfect peace with each other, and God even walked with them in the garden.

But something happened that plunged this perfect world into the conflict that still rages today, something that causes all the suffering on the planet. The first sin was committed. You may think of sin as breaking a rule, but as we see in the Eden story, sin is simply disbelieving God’s word and disobeying his will. From the moment Eve disbelieved and disobeyed, everything and everyone has been infected by sin. Roses have thorns. Airports need metal detectors. Cities need cemeteries. And sin has poisoned more than the world around us. Why do we do things we know we shouldn’t, and why don’t we do what we know we should? Something is wrong in our hearts.

But God never leaves a problem unsolved. In the same moment sin entered the world, God had the solution ready, and he revealed it almost immediately in a single verse holding hope for the entire world. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). The serpent would bruise the heel of this Savior, but the Savior would trample the head of the serpent. You don’t have to be a doctor to know which injury is worse—a bite to the foot or a kick to the head! Sin was to be defeated. We were to be rescued.

You may never have heard this verse referred to as the first Christmas story, but that’s exactly what it is. It’s the very first verse in the Bible to tell of a Savior who would bring us salvation from our sin. The most familiar Christmas verse in the Bible is probably Luke 2:11: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” The very first word used to describe the newborn baby is “Savior” because that is what the world had been waiting for all those long years since Eve ate the fruit. Only when we understand our need for a Savior can we fully experience the celebration of his birth. So with every Christmas movie we watch, every cookie we bake, every carol we sing, and every decoration we hang, let these words echo: “I need a Savior—and he is here!”


The 25 Days of Christmas

 

[Clifford]

What Child Is This?

ISAIAH 9:6-7

In 1865, as Christmas was approaching, an insurance salesman named William Chatterton Dix wrote a poem he called “The Manger Throne.” Dix imagined that those who passed by the manger 2000 years ago might have been confused about who the child was who lay before them. Why was he in a feedbox? Why were shepherds worshipping him? Why were angels singing over him? Part of the poem was set to a traditional English melody, and it eventually became the well-loved Christmas song “What Child Is This?”

The world has been asking that question and debating the answer for the past 2000 years. Muslims, for example, believe that Jesus was born of a virgin just as Christians do, but they see him only as a great prophet, not as God. Many Jewish people now see Jesus as a great teacher and political activist but not the Messiah. Buddhists see him as a perfectly enlightened being, full of compassion, who helps others. And millions of people who don’t embrace any particular religion don’t know what they think about him. So the question remains, what child is this?

Well, 700 years before Jesus was born—before the star shone, the shepherds knelt, and the angels sang—a prophet of God named Isaiah told us in no uncertain terms exactly who this child was.
Jesus would come to be known by many names and titles—Lord, Savior, Christ, King of Kings, the Lion of Judah, the Rose of Sharon—but Isaiah gives us four special names that tell us specifically what Jesus would be to us. To the hurting and confused, Jesus is the Wonderful Counselor.

Isaiah 28:29 says, “The LORD of hosts…is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom.” Unlike human counselors, Jesus doesn’t give advice or opinions—He gives truth. He is the truth (John 14:6). The greatest counselor you can ever have is the Son of God; the greatest counsel you will ever find is in the word of God.

To the helpless, Jesus is the Mighty God. Present everywhere, limitless in power, with nothing hidden from his knowledge, he is an ever-present help (Psalm 46:1). Nothing is impossible with this Mighty God. To the orphan and the lonely, Jesus is the Everlasting Father, a Father who will never leave or forsake you, who was before all things and will outlast all things, and who knew your name from before the foundations of the earth. And to the hopeless and weary, Jesus is the Prince of Peace. The peace he gives is not like the peace the world gives, which depends on fragile treaties and temporary solutions. Jesus gives perfect peace that can weather any storm.

Someday, the whole world will no longer have to ask, “What child is this?” The child who was laid in a manger will sit on a throne. The babe worshipped by shepherds will be worshipped by kings and rulers. And of the reign of this Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace, there will be no end.


Everlasting Father, thank you for loving us before the beginning of time. Mighty God, thank you for being our helper and our defender. Wonderful Counselor, thank you for giving us your word to guide us. And Prince of Peace, help us to share your peace with those around us this Christmas. Amen.

Sing
Find a recording of “What Child Is This?” As your family listens to the carol, consider who Jesus has revealed himself to be and who he is to you. Next, find a recording of “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” from Handel’s Messiah and listen to it as a family, noting every time one of Jesus’s names is sung. See if you can memorize all four names by the end of the song—or even the whole verse!


The 25 Days of Christmas

 

[Clifford]

The Masterpiece

MATTHEW 1:1-17; LUKE 3:23-38


When reading the book of Matthew or Luke, it’s tempting to skip over the long lists of names found in the early chapters. After reading three or four names into one of these lists, you may feel your eyes start to glaze over. Get to the good part, you may be thinking! These long family trees may not seem as interesting as the familiar stories about the shepherds and the wise men, but every word of the Bible is from God, so if he thought it was important for us to know who was in Jesus’s family tree, we need to pay attention.

To understand why the genealogies listed in Matthew and Luke are important, think of the story of Jesus as you would a huge painting or mosaic—a masterpiece by a master artist, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. Michelangelo took four years to complete the huge work, and only when viewed from a distance, from the floor of the chapel, can the scale and scope of the full work be appreciated. In the same way, when we look at the big picture of Christmas, we can appreciate the thousands of years and millions of tiny brushstrokes God used to complete the masterpiece of the birth of Christ.

Matthew presents Jesus as the Messiah, a figure the Jews had been told would be a king. Unlike a president, a king does not come to rule by ballot, but by birth. A king has to prove his right to the throne by proving he is descended from the royal family. God had revealed that the Messiah’s “right to rule” would be proven by three things: He would come from the family of Abraham (Genesis 22:18), he would come from the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10), and he would come from the house of David (2 Samuel 7:12-13). Now you see why God thought it was important for us to see these names in Jesus’s family tree—they demonstrate his legal right to the throne.

But the genealogies reveal even more than that. Jesus’s legal right to rule came through Joseph, but the Bible makes clear that the Messiah would be a descendant of David. As Joseph’s adopted son, Jesus was a legal descendant but not a descendant of David by birth. Just so there would be no doubt at all about Jesus’s claim to the throne, God told Luke to include the other side of his genealogy—his mother’s side—which can also be traced back to David through one of his other sons. Jesus was physically born of Mary, so her genealogy shows us that he was a literal descendant of David as well as a legal descendant.

God didn’t leave one square inch of his canvas unfinished. He didn’t use one brushstroke too many or too few, but just the right strokes and just the right colors to create the masterpiece of the birth of Christ.


Dear Father, thank you for being the master artist who arranges our lives the same way you arranged Jesus’s claim to his throne. Help us to trust that you are always working to place us exactly where you want us in the masterpiece you’re creating.


The 25 Days of Christmas

 

[Clifford]

Jesus’s Family Tree

MATTHEW 1:3-6
3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, 4 and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5 and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, 6 and Jesse the father of David the king.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah,

Have you ever examined your family tree? A family tree is a diagram that shows all the individuals who make up your family, from your great-great-great-great-grandparents all the way to you. Some people love to research their family tree because they like to find out where they came from and who they’re related to. It can be especially fun to discover that you’re distantly related to a famous person from history, like George Washington or Thomas Edison!

You might think Jesus’s family tree would be full of some of the wisest, most influential, and most righteous people who ever lived. But the truth is, Jesus’s family tree has quite a few names on it that we wouldn’t necessarily want to brag about having in our family. Abraham was a liar who pretended his wife was his sister. Jacob was a cheater who stole his brother’s birthright. And though David was a king, he was also an adulterer and a murderer. Perhaps the most surprising person to appear on Jesus’s family tree, however, is Rahab, David’s great-great-grandmother.

In Jesus’s time, Jewish culture didn’t regard women very highly, so it’s surprising that Rahab is mentioned in Jesus’s genealogy at all. We might conclude that she was an exceptionally righteous or humble person to be Jesus’s ancestor and mentioned by name in his family tree, but when we read her story, we find out that she was not only a Canaanite—an enemy of the Israelites and an idolater—but also a woman with a very bad reputation. Respectable society wouldn’t have had anything to do with this woman, yet God changed her heart, changed her life, and included her in his master plan. He gave her an important part to play in giving the Promised Land to his people, and he even included her in his own Son’s family tree.

None of the names in the first chapter of Matthew are there by accident. God guided the marriages and births that had to take place through the centuries to form Jesus’s family tree, and every person in his lineage was handpicked by God to be part of it.
I’m willing to bet that most of those people had no idea during their lifetimes of the way God was using them in his much bigger plan to save the world. That’s an important truth for us to remember—our lives might seem obscure or unimportant or broken or sinful, but God can use every person who’s ever been born and fit us exactly where he wants us to be in his plan for the world.


Lord, thank you for the reminder that you are willing to use any of us, regardless of the mistakes we’ve made or the way we’ve messed up in the past, as long as we are available to you. Help us to see the ways you want to use us this Christmas, and give us grace to be obedient to your leading. Amen.


The 25 Days of Christmas

 

[Clifford]

The Waiting Room

LUKE 1:5-25

Sitting in a hospital waiting room is no fun. Not knowing what the doctor will say, not knowing whether the cancer is back, not knowing if the operation was successful…these are difficult situations.

You may find yourselves in other “waiting rooms” too—waiting for a job, waiting to meet someone to spend the rest of your life with, or waiting for enough money to pay the rent. If you’ve ever found yourself in one of these waiting rooms, you know what the Jewish people had been feeling like for hundreds of years before Jesus was born.

Lots of children today hear the story of Santa Claus and wait anxiously for him to bring gifts on Christmas Eve, but for thousands of years, children in Jewish families were told a true story far more wonderful and awe-inspiring. They learned that God would one day send a Messiah, a Deliverer, someone who would rule over the entire world. They waited anxiously for him, but as the centuries passed and the Jewish people were subjected to captivity, foreign rule, and persecution, no Messiah appeared. Now, just before the birth of Christ, they’d been sitting in the waiting room for 400 years without even a whisper from God—no prophecies, no miracles, nothing.

Zechariah and Elizabeth had been in their own waiting room throughout their marriage. For decades they had prayed that God would bless them with a child, and for decades their arms and Elizabeth’s womb had remained empty. Zechariah and Elizabeth probably felt a lot like the nation of Israel—weary of praying, losing hope that God would respond, wondering if he was even listening—when an angel suddenly showed up in the waiting room.

“Your prayer has been heard,” the angel said. If you’ve ever felt as if your prayers were being spoken to an empty room, you know how encouraged Zechariah must have been when he discovered that God had been listening to every word. What’s more, God had not been idle or forgetful during those years of silence. God had marked the birthday of Zechariah’s child on his calendar before Elizabeth and Zechariah were married…before they were even born! Throughout their long years of praying, he had been moving in the events of the world to bring Zechariah, Elizabeth, Joseph, Mary, Caesar Augustus, and the nation of Israel to this exact point in time when everything would align for his plan of salvation to be set into motion.

Even when you feel as if you’ve been in the waiting room forever or God has forgotten all about you, Zechariah and Elizabeth’s story shows that while we are waiting, God is moving. During those 400 years of silence, when the Jews were tempted to lose faith that a Messiah would ever come, God had already made and confirmed his reservations for his time on earth. His arrival date was on the calendar before the creation of the world. Christmas proves that God never forgets his promises and always keep his appointments. So no matter how long you’ve been in the waiting room, keep watching—God is coming!


Lord Jesus, thank you for your perfect timing at the first Christmas and in each of our lives. Help us to trust that when you seem to be silent, you’re still working to accomplish your purpose in our lives. Give us patience when we’re in the waiting room, and thank you that we have Christmas as a reminder that you came once and are coming again. Amen.


The 25 Days of Christmas