Hello, I’m David Jeremiah and welcome to the Why the Nativity Experience as we live out the wonder of his love. I read about the pastor of a prairie church who one year directed the children’s program on the Sunday night before Christmas. Visitors came from miles away and it was standing room only.
The pastor was especially excited about the final scene of the production in which four children would give recitations using the letters held up S t which stood for shepherds, trees, angels, and redeemer. Well, the scene opened with Silent Night playing softly in the background as the four children filed on stage holding posters.
The narrator solemnly spoke into the microphone saying, “And now four of our children are going to tell you how they feel about Christmas.” On that cue, the youngsters turned over their cars, which should have spelled the word star. Unfortunately, they had lined up backwards and what the letter said instead was rats. I guess that’s the way many people feel about Christmas.
High prices, crowded malls, exhausting parties, snarled traffic, blown diets, and cold weather. And one of the reasons we feel like saying rats at Christmas is that we take our eyes off the original story. Distracted by the activities of the season, we forget the reason we celebrate. It’s impossible to have the right perspective about Christmas without remembering the person at the center of it.
Everything changes when we focus on the who, what, and why of Christmas. So let’s take a moment and review the basics. The who, what, and why of the greatest story ever told. The who is given to us in the first syllable of Christmas. It is Christ. The babe enshrouded in swaddling clothes and lying quietly in the scattered hay was and is the wonderful [music] counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting father, and the prince of peace.
He is the light of the world and the bread of life. And he’s the king of kings, the king of the ages, and the king of the Jews. He is Emmanuel, God with us. As he slumbered between ox and donkey, tended by Joseph and Mary. He was God in disguise, the incarnate deity, the alpha, the omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
The whole teaching of the Bible and of Christianity in all its major branches is that Jesus Christ was and is the infinite God himself, pure, perfect, sinless, and holy. It was the great I am who created the nocturnal skies under which shepherd boys watched their lambs, who formed the glittering stars into which eastern magi peered with interest, [music] and who birthed the creation into the world which he descended in the fullness of time.
