"God's Pleasing Christmas Present"

Dec.21/03 eve Blyth Community Christmas Service

Col.1:9-23 Lk.2:22-32

The Missing Present

In just a few days it will be Christmas Eve. That's the time at our house when, after the kids are in bed, Mom & Dad haul out the presents from their hiding places and we carefully arrange them under the tree. There's a particular order we follow with the smaller gifts first and the biggest one last. We have to make sure we haven't forgotten someone's present; it would be difficult for one child to come up short, so we try to even out the number of gifts. A missing present would be no fun at all.

      A woman had a circle of friends for whom she really wanted to buy Christmas presents. But time slipped away and it was so busy at work for her, she just wasn't able to get to the store to purchase those gifts. Time was running out. So not too many days before Christmas she decided to give up on the gift idea and just buy everybody the same beautiful Christmas card. She went to the local gift store and hurriedly went through the now picked-over stack of cards and found a box of 50, just exactly what she wanted. She didn't take time to read the message; she just noticed a beautiful cover on it, with gold around it and a floral appearance on the front of the card and she thought, "That's perfect." So she signed all of them, "With all my love." As New Year's came and she had time to go back to 2 or 3 cards she didn't send from that box, she was shocked to read the message inside. It said in a little rhyme, "This Christmas card is just to say, a little gift is on its way."

      Oops! Something was missing. Yet we may fall into the same trap. We can forget to give God His present. Jesus is God's gift to us - we'll talk about that first, the Incarnation of the Firstborn. But the Bible also talks about our gift to God, the "missing present" absent from under the tree in too many homes: Jesus came in order to present us to God, the Transformation of the Earth-born.

Incarnation of the Firstborn

First let's talk about God's gift to us. The word used to describe Jesus coming from heaven to take on human form and be born at Bethlehem is "Incarnation". Sounds like some kind of evaporated milk - just think of the Mighty Eternal God suddenly depending on a mother's nursing in order to survive! Without the incarnation, with no 'enfleshment', there would be no crucifixion, no substitution or taking our place, and no salvation, no rescue for us from our sin. JI Packer said, "The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains." It seems too wonderful to consider the Maker of heaven and earth became an actual human like us, but that's the central truth of Christmas. Martin Luther said, "Let us not flutter too high, but remain by the manger and the swaddling clothes of Christ, 'in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.'"

      In what's arguably the richest description in the New Testament of who this little baby really is, Paul's letter to the Colossians uses phrases like these: image of the invisible God; firstborn over all creation; all things were created by Him and for Him; in Him all things hold together. He's the firstborn from among the dead (this anticipates Jesus' resurrection); all God's fullness dwells in Him.

      In Jesus of Nazareth we finally see God, He is "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being" as Hebrews (1:3) puts it. He is "the image of the invisible God" (Col.1:9). In Christ, the mask has come off.

      A children's TV program in Tennessee was hosted by a cowboy wearing a mask like the Lone Ranger's. He teased his listeners about his identity. Excitement mounted when he announced one Monday that on Friday's program he would remove his mask. Ratings soared that week as the young viewers tuned in, eager to find out who the cowboy host was in real life. The day came, then the hour, then the moment. Reaching behind his head, he untied his mask. But to everyone's consternation, just as the mask came off, he turned his back to the camera -- and the kids were left no wiser than before! God didn't play that trick on us: we can really come to know the Father by looking at the Son, Jesus.

      But the wonder is not just that God has finally unveiled Himself and come to pay us a visit in this bouncing 9-pound bundle, as if to be put on display like some kind of rare Royal Doulton figurine. This is a baby on a mission. Nativity scenes are peaceful and sweet and innocent, but this is in stark contrast to our fallen human environment. Even while the shepherds were kneeling in worship, Herod was plotting the newborn Messiah's destruction. The Bible says God sent Jesus because we were "alienated from God" -- aliens, like from another planet. Everything about God was foreign to us. We were "enemies in [our] minds because of [our] evil behaviour". We know we have acted like terrorists in our relationships, demanding our own way; like miniature Saddams we too have betrayed and bombed with words and neglect those who needed our attention. We've been stuck in a severe sin problem; the wages of sin is death, the only solution was for a perfect Person to take our place and pay the penalty. So God sent the Son He loves to "rescue us from the dominion of darkness", "to reconcile to Himself all things, making peace through His blood, shed on the cross."

      This is the little baby that Simeon took in His arms when Joseph and Mary brought Him soon after birth to Jerusalem to "present" Him to the Lord. Even that ceremony was a picture of God's plan of redemption: the parents made an offering of "a pair of doves or two young pigeons" as a sacrifice, a substitution, for the life of the baby. Later in life the child would Himself offer up His life to redeem many, no longer symbolically but in fact. How does Spirit-led Simeon describe Mary's son? What was it he was looking at that day? "My eyes have seen your salvation,...a light for revelation to the Gentiles..." (Luke 2:31-32) God was going to show people through this special boy how they could be saved from their sins, for that's what the name "Jesus" meant (Mt.1:21).

      So Jesus, the Incarnation of the Firstborn, is God's Christmas present to us. Karen Stiller writes of the wonder of the mighty God coming into the midst of our human hecticness, the preparations we go through this time of year that can crowd out the true meaning if we're not careful. She confesses, "It takes a stronger woman than I to resist the siren calls of magazine covers with gingerbread high-rises and phyllo-wrapped pecan crusted wheels of brie rolled out of the kitchen by a woman whose shirt is buttoned up properly. And into all this commotion, a Saviour is born. Amidst all this insecurity and over-achieving, somewhere under all this crumpled wrapping paper and lost instructions and despite the 1000-piece Kathie Kiddie Kitchen, Emmanuel is with us. But so is the Sears Wish Book. And it seems to get so much more attention."

The Transformation of the Earth-born

Jesus Christ is God's present to us. What we do with this gift determines whether there's anything under the tree from us to our Maker. YOU are the present God's looking for in return. Listen carefully to Col.1:22: "But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation..." We can keep Christmas at a distance, viewing it as merely a time to decorate up the house and get together with relatives. We can dismiss it as a children's festivity, or cynically consider it just a retailer's excuse for a commercial extravaganza, as it has become. But the whole point of what happened that night in a dark smelly stable was so we might face up to the dark stink of our worst thoughts and deeds and find deliverance from the power of evil. Salvation by trusting that Jesus is who the Bible says He is, salvation that works itself out in our changed behaviour.

      Meditate a few moments on the phrases Paul uses to describe who Christians become. "Holy in [God's] sight, without blemish and free from accusation" -- when you receive Christ as Lord, that's how God sees you, absolutely pure and clean, from a moral point of view "white as snow" (Is.1:18). That's because Jesus did away with all our sin when He suffered and died. Moreover, you have an inheritance, something to hold on to that will outlast all the trinkets and titles of this life: the Bible says God "has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light".

      God was pleased to have His fullness dwell in Jesus, His present to us. In return, it pleases Him when we "live a life worthy of the Lord" - when we earth-borns start to allow His transformation to make changes in our attitudes and habits. Colossians 1:9-11 lists several ways we give God this present, in response to His for us. Paul mentions not stopping praying, and joyfully giving thanks to our Heavenly Father. Being filled with "the knowledge of [God's] will" is another form the present takes, along with "growing in the knowledge of God". Make it a New Year's project to find a meaningful Bible translation and read it! We can "bear fruit in every good work", showing kindness in our families, to our friends, neighbours, and others who cross our path. If people have had health troubles and can't do something for themselves, offer to do it for them. Also Paul refers to "great endurance and patience": if the Lord allows hardship to come into your life, bear up with longsuffering as Jesus did. Even if no one else knows how much pain or heartache you're encountering, God knows; He'll stand by you to encourage you. Quiet endurance is just as much a part of the present as the more active and outward things, such as good works.

Getting It: Giving & God's Fridge Door

Jesus came to the manger as God's gift for you. The key thing God's looking for as His present in return is YOU, your living conversational daily relationship with Him. He loves you, otherwise Christmas would never have happened. It pleases Him mightily when we open up to Him and get to know Him better.

      Karen Stiller in her article, The Gaudy and the Glory, talks about the transformation their family has gone through, and the present of our persons that God is pleased to have from us -- despite all our modern-day paraphernalia to do with this season that get in the way. She says, "In an attempt to move the attention away from what the children are getting to what they are giving, we do things like tearfully give away old used toys to make room for shiny new ones. And we save our coins, mostly the ones from the dryer and the couch, to buy a World Vision goat for poor people in some far off land. But in the moremoremore fever that spikes my children's temperatures till they are delirious with desire, all they manage to hear is that we are getting a goat. They whisper excitedly among themselves about our new goat until we explain again that the goat is not for us, it is for other people who may not be getting moonshoes for Christmas this year.

      "And somehow, miraculously, they eventually do get it, the giving part. And maybe that is the miracle. That Christ is with us in the midst of a 21st century Canadian Christmas, despite everything we've done to Christmas, or everything we allow Christmas to do to us.

      "I used to think that if Jesus came back during his birthday blow-out that He would fashion a whip from all those discarded ribbons and crushed bows and kick us all out of His temple. Now I am less certain. Maybe He would recognize our clumsy and extravagant gestures of Christmas celebration as the love for Him that they occasionally are, and stick them on His refrigerator door like a mother enchanted by a smudged drawing that makes little sense to anyone else."

      That's the missing present, what the Lord's seeking from us: our clumsy gestures of love for Him. It all started with some straw in a manger, and the precious Present for us laid therein. Let's pray.