God Appears In Our World

I grew up loving Christmas and have never grown tired of it.

For most of my adult life, either we have traveled to be with family for Christmas or they have traveled to be with us. This year it will be no different. We will have family in our home this year for all but two days from December 14 through January 3.

While growing up, it wasn’t that way. We were always home at Christmas. We could not travel at Christmas, and our extended family lived away from us. So Christmas every year was celebrated with our immediate family: Mom and Dad, my two sisters and one brother, and my grandmother (Dad’s mother who lived with us in the winter). We opened presents around the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and then awoke early on Christmas morning to check out our gifts from Santa Claus — often gifts that were too big to be easily wrapped.

After opening presents on Christmas Eve, though, we sat around the living room as Dad took Mom’s well-worn King James Version Bible and read us the Christmas story from Luke 2. That became the highlight of Christmas for me. I don’t know if Luke’s account of the birth of Christ is my favorite story in the Bible, but it certainly ranks right up there.

I don’t remember the gifts I opened through those years, but I remember “The Gift of Christmas.” The gift God gave to the world is still the most important part of Christmas for me. I hope it is for you too.

This year I want to help you understand “Christmas According to John.” He doesn’t tell us the stories of Christmas as Matthew and Luke do, but he tells us the meaning of Christmas. It can be summed up in the phrase I will use as a theme for my December messages: “God Appears in Our World.”

John calls Jesus the Word. He says in John 1:1 that from the very beginning “the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This One who came into our world, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas is God himself coming to live among us.

John makes this clear in John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Make Christmas special this year. Let’s find out together how God made his appearance among us. John says about Christ: “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4). And he says so much more. You want to know that kind of person — and you can.

So, enjoy Christmas this year. I hope you enjoy everything about it, that you will meet the God who appears in our world, and that you will never grow tired of him.