We seem to celebrate Christmas with a great deal of razzmatazz these days – I was walking through a local shopping mall the other day and there were Santa’s and carols playing and very expensive decorations all over – you almost get the impression that Christmas is this, this … celebrity event.

Have you ever felt like, like an ugly duckling? You know that Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale of the little duckling that was uglier than all the rest. And all the other little ducklings gave him a hard time about his ugliness and they picked on him and they rejected him. It went on for weeks and months until finally he was alone. And as time slipped by, he grew up. And one day he was on his own, on the pond and he looked down and what he saw shocked him. It was his reflection on the water. What he saw was, in fact, that he’d grown up into a beautiful swan. He wasn’t a duck at all, he was a swan.

We’ve all felt a little like that ugly duckling some days. Part of that’s natural because we compare ourselves with others. Part of it’s fuelled by the media. We live in the age of media mega-stars – people who are larger than life; people who seem to be having so much more fun than we are; people who are earning a lot more money than we are. They’re more beautiful than we are. By comparison, we’re nothing more than, well, an ugly duckling. So Berni, what’s that got to do with Christmas? Well as it turns out, everything. It has everything to do with Christmas.

Super-stars, mega-stars, sport-stars, rock bands, movie stars, the rich, the famous – the things that so many people aspire to being and having but will never be and never have. Some point in our lives, we do wake up and we realise that we’re not going to be rich and famous. That’s a disappointment to so many.

I was speaking recently, with a leader of a poor country. I was talking about the national debt and the economic reconstruction and the education and the health care issues. All those things are so important to his country that’s rebuilding itself after conflict and strife, but as we were speaking I just felt to share this with him. That ultimately, the financial prosperity of his people, whilst necessarily important, (A) is not something that the government alone can do and (B) in any case, it’s not the end game because financial prosperity alone doesn’t bring quality of life.

You and I know that’s true. Even though, from time to time, we allow ourselves to be seduced by the glitz and the glamour that’s held out as being the norm, a norm to which you and I should aspire. The advertising industry and the PR machine do that because they want to grab our cash by telling us, ‘Here’s an ideal that you should aspire to and you can, by spending your money with this’.

I was listening to a woman the other day, speaking. She’s a retired teacher and these days she does relief teaching. You know, when the teacher’s off sick, she goes in and stands in. And she was teaching at one of the wealthiest schools in Australia the other day.

Now, you have to understand this school. It’s the place where the mega wealthy send their children. The school fees for one child, for one term are the annual salary for ten families in the developing world. The land on which the school stands, the land alone, is worth hundred’s of million’s. There are more Rolls Royce’s and Porsche’s and Mercedes Benz’s and BMW’s, picking kids up from school at this school, than just about anywhere else on the planet. Financially, it doesn’t get any better than this but here is what she shared with me.

She said the majority, listen to this, the majority of these kids don’t really know their parents. They don’t have quality time with their parents. The majority of these kids are lonely and alienated. You see this ugly underbelly of wealth – the squandering of the lives of a generation. She said, ‘I have worked with the disabled and with the abused and you name it, I’ve taught them but on the whole, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more needy group of children than these.’

Do you see how deceptive the mega-star, mega-wealth, super-star thing is? I’m not saying that all mega-stars and all the mega-wealthy are like this, no I’m not saying that. But what I am saying is that ‘mega-star syndrome’ and mega-wealth doesn’t solve all our problems. Money alone doesn’t make it better, sometimes it makes it worse.

So you might be thinking, ‘Okay Berni, what’s this got to do with Christmas?’ Well, simply this. We spend our lives feeling as though we’re ugly ducklings because we compare ourselves to this ideal of the mega-star and the mega-wealthy when all along, for the vast majority of us, we were never meant to be one of those. In our own way, even though we may not quite see it and understand it, we’re a swan, beautifully hand-crafted by God. And you might say, ‘How can you say that Berni? You don’t know me; I’m nothing special to look at. I don’t have any special gifts or abilities.’ And that’s where Christmas comes in, to help us with this dilemma.

See, about seven or seven hundred and fifty years before Jesus was born, a man called Isaiah, a prophet, prophesied about this coming of the Messiah. This is what he wrote, Isaiah chapter 53 beginning at verse 1:

Who has believed what we have heard and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of a dry ground. He had no formal majesty that we could look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others. A man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity and as one whom others would hide their faces, he was despised and we held him of no account. 

Surely he has borne our infirmities, carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our inequities. Upon him was the punishment that made us whole and by his bruises, we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray, we’ve all turned our own way and the Lord has laid on him, the inequity of us all.

That prophecy was about Jesus. Jesus, this same baby that was born at Christmas and what Isaiah is saying, in fact, what God is saying through Isaiah, is that this Jesus was nothing special. He was like a little plant that grew up out of the ground. I mean, how many plants are there in the field or forest. He was like some little root that grew up out of the dry ground. He was nothing special to look at – a baby in a manger, not a palace. No formal majesty that would make us look to him and say, ‘There he is, there’s the Son of God, there’s the saviour of the world’. Nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him, just an ordinary, poor, carpenter’s son, born in an ordinary stable.

He was despised and rejected, acquainted with suffering. Others hid their faces from Him, he was held of no account as being worthless. He was, for all intents and purposes, the ugly duckling was He not? And yet He was and is and always will be the Son of God. The humanity that He chose to clothe himself in wasn’t that of a prince but of a pauper. He came for you and me; He came so lowly in His station, that He made the declaration through His birth and His life that He came for us all. For every ugly duckling on this planet, for every stray sheep, for every mongrel dog. No matter how worthless we may feel, in the world’s eyes we may be, He was more worthless still.

And yet He was and is and always will be the Son of the living God. And this is what the angels told the shepherds to look for:

‘This will be the sign for you. You’ll find a child wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger.’

A kid in rags in a feed trough, the archetypal ugly duckling, who came to planet earth for you and me. Do you get it? Do you see it? That’s what Christmas is about – it’s ugly duckling season. Jesus!

Have you ever wondered what that first Christmas was like for the key players – for Mary, for Joseph. I mean what were they doing, how were they feeling … the day before the baby was born?

The other day I had a rather long drive in the car, or at least, that’s how it seemed. It was actually only an hour and a half but it felt like an eternity. It had been such a long day, it was late at night, I was tired and as we were driving along, I just wanted to get home and get into my nice warm bed.

It’s funny how much worse things seem when we’re tired. But at least, I was in a car with a comfortable seat and a radio to listen to. As we were driving along I couldn’t help but wonder how Mary felt in that week or so, leading up to that first Christmas.

She was, well, very pregnant, almost full-term, and she had to travel on the back of a donkey from Galilee, all the way down to Judea. Now Nazareth to Bethlehem is about 113 kilometres, 70 miles as the crow flies. With all the winding tracks and roads, it was more like 145 kilometres or 90 miles. And it’s a climb in altitude of almost 400 metres or 1300 feet. So this was no easy trip for this woman.

You may have guessed, I’ve never been pregnant but those who have, tell me that those last couple of weeks can be really quite uncomfortable and tiring. Well Mary, Mary spent at least a week on the back of a donkey. Step after jarring step, heading towards Bethlehem, just to discover, when she arrived there, that the travel agent had forgotten to book them a hotel room.

So easy to sit here 2,000 years on and just kind of read the nice little Christmas story without having any real sense of the hardship that Mary and Joseph went through. Why were they going to Bethlehem? Well because the Roman administration had decided to have a census and, of course, they had no computers to collate all the information back in those days. So, the people had to return back to their ancestral home town to be counted.

Can you imagine the roads, if you could call them that? They must have been packed with people, criss-crossing all over the country back to their home town. This was at least a week’s journey, at walking pace, for Mary and Joseph. Now, a week is like 6 or 7 nights and they didn’t pull up each night at a 5-star hotel or a motel and sleep in a nice soft bed.

My hunch is, with all those people travelling, they probably slept rough out in the open. Not even a blow up mattress for this heavily pregnant woman. No room service for breakfast. Just a quick bite somehow, somewhere, competing with all the other travellers for something, and getting back on that donkey again for another day – plodding towards Bethlehem, climbing steadily up that escarpment.

Imagine what she was thinking on her journey. She didn’t have a comfortable car seat to sit on. She couldn’t tilt her back and have a snooze or listen to the radio. No, none of that. She was very pregnant, very tired and very uncomfortable. How long that journey must had seemed.

But God had a plan, this Bethlehem thing. It was known as the city of David, and it was Joseph’s ancestral home and he was returning there by royal decree to be counted. He was just one of the ordinary people, nothing special, just one little family amongst all of Israel, doing what all the other families in Israel were doing.

And God’s plan was shared a few years before, through the prophet Micah. This is what he wrote, Micah chapter 5 beginning at verse 2. He said:

‘But you O Bethlehem, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days. Therefore, he shall give them up until the time when, she who is in labour has brought forth. Then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.’

God’s plan, through this prophecy, was for His Son to be born in Bethlehem. Which means, literally, ‘the house of bread, the baker’s shop’, where the Bread of Life came into the world. That’s what Jesus called Himself, the Bread of Life. We’ll have a look at that in just a moment.

But think about it, this prophecy came about where the Messiah would be born. It was made centuries before. Mary’s pregnant and God uses the government, the Roman administration, the occupying force, to make sure that she is in Bethlehem just at the time of the birth, to fulfil that prophecy. Not something she could have arranged for herself.

Jesus kind of interprets this whole story, a few decades later, when some people asked Him for a miracle, a sign that confirmed that He was indeed the Messiah. Let’s have a listen:

So they said to him, ‘What sign are you going to give us, so that we may see and believe? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness as its written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’

And Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you. It was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven but it’s my Father who gives true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’

And they said to Him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never by hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty but I said to you, that you have seen me and yet you do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me and anyone who comes to me, I will never drive away.

For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but to do the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me that I should lose nothing of all that He has given to me but raise it up in the last day. This indeed is the will of my Father. That all who see the Son and believe in Him may have eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day.’

The Jews began to complain about Him because He said, ‘I am the bread of life that came down from heaven.’ They were saying, ‘Isn’t this Jesus, the Son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know. How can He say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’

Jesus answered them, ‘Don’t complain among yourselves. No-one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God. He has seen the Father.

Very truly I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.’

Jesus is the Bread of Life. Manna was the food that God sent down to the Israelites when they were in the wilderness for forty years, in the Exodus. The word manna means literally, ‘what the blazes is that?’ And I guess it’s really good for Jesus to say, ‘I am the manna of life’. Because no-one really understood Him, they were all looking at Him saying, ‘Who the blazes is this? Isn’t this just this little Jesus guy from Nazareth?’

They were confused but Jesus was born in the ‘house of bread’, Bethlehem. Jesus was and is the Bread of Life. He came down from heaven like manna in the wilderness but so common, so ordinary –just Jesus from Nazareth. Jesus was a common name, Joshua actually, among the Jews – Josh.

But this whole ‘bread of life’ thing, that’s not what was in Joseph and Mary’s mind on that long and arduous journey. I’m sure they just longed for a soft bed and a good wash and a hearty meal and a good night’s sleep. And then, as they come to this tiny Bethlehem, a few miles from Jerusalem, they discover that it’s so packed full with travellers coming for the census, they couldn’t even find a room.

It’s only that the inn keeper took pity on her because she was pregnant that they even got some space out with the farm animals in the stable. I reckon the day before Christmas was just a hard and tiring day for them. The end of a long journey, the disappointment of no bed but here, very soon, the bread of life would come down from heaven into this world.

God’s plan was so miraculous, so ‘every day’, so ordinary, so humble. As I sat in my comfortable car, heading home that night and thought about this story, I realised that really I have no idea. What an amazing God to send His Son into my world in such a humble way. Christmas!

Well, it’s here. We’ve arrived. Today is Christmas day. And I know it’s not going to be much of a surprise for you, but we have a special Christmas message planned for you today.

Well, I just don’t know what sort of a Christmas you’ve been planning and what sort of day you’ve been having. But there are so many different ways of people celebrating Christmas around the world. Some have a log fire burning and snow’s coming down outside. I’ve never had a Christmas like that. For me it’s always been a BBQ outside, in the heat and the flies.

And just as there are these opposites of sun and snow, I guess there are emotional opposites in Christmas too. Some people are having such a great Christmas. You know, truly celebrating the joy of God’s Son coming into the world, surrounded by those they love. And others, well some are having a very lonely Christmas, completely alone. Some are having a hungry Christmas. Some have just experienced the loss of love or perhaps a marriage breakdown.

Somehow Christmas magnifies what’s going on in our lives. If its joy, Christmas brings that joy to the fore, after all it’s a celebration. If it’s sadness, then somehow Christmas brings that sadness into a sharper focus. I wonder what sort of a Christmas you’ll have.

I want to share a story with you today about a Christmas a few years back now. I used to be on the board of an aged care facility, through my Church. We had nursing homes and hostel accommodation for the elderly, spread over several locations and do you know what I noticed? Is that we, the Church, were organising our Christmas that year, and every other year it turned out, in a way that was very self-centred, at least that’s what I thought. Here’s how it went.

We organised Christmas services at each of our aged care homes a few days before Christmas. There was a reason for that. It was so that we could have our Christmas celebrations with our families and we wouldn’t have to be concerned about running a service for the elderly at their accommodation. Now, I thought about that. Well isn’t Christmas Day Christmas for them too? Why don’t we drive down there and bring them up to Church? No, the Church would have none of that. Or let’s go down to them and have a Christmas service with them, right there where they live? I mean it’s Christmas day for them too, isn’t it? No.

So I took this up with the senior minister and we had, what I recall, was a pretty heated discussion. His position was that we were having our traditional family Christmas day service at the Church and we weren’t going to draw resources away from that. Once a year, that’s what we’re doing, that’s it!

Well, I saw red at this point. I don’t very often defy authority but on this occasion I did. I decided to organise a Christmas day service at one of our aged care facilities, just near where I lived. So, just the three of us went down there that Christmas morning – Jacqui my wife, Melissa my daughter, who would have been about 12 or 13 at the time and yours truly. And eight elderly residents showed up. We sang carols together, we had a short message, we prayed, we had a cuppa afterwards and some Christmas cake.

Nothing big, nothing impressive except there was this one woman who arrived in a wheelchair. Her name was Holly, she had her leg amputated and the moment she came in on her wheelchair, I recognised her. She was the mother of the pastor of my previous Church and I knew she didn’t believe in Jesus. In fact, her son, my former pastor, had told me she was very, very anti-God and anti-church. I’d met her a couple of times before and she recognised me too.

She sat through the entire service that day. I don’t know what went on in her heart, I don’t know whether she met her saviour for the first time that day but what I do know is, that when I told her son about it, he was amazed. She’d never before in her life attended a church service out of her own free will. Later, the following year, she passed away.

I have never, ever, ever regretted spending that hour with those eight people that Christmas morning. It was a humble place. It wasn’t a big cathedral; there was no great choir or impressive hymns. It wasn’t the packed family Christmas service with the pantomime’s and the proud parents but you know, a few of them came up to afterwards, over a cup of tea that morning and they told me how they had no family to come and pick them up. They were going to spend Christmas alone that year, in the deserted halls of that aged care facility.

And you know, when my young daughter, Melissa, went around and handed them each a little chocolate and a gift, I have to tell you, it meant so much to them to have a young girl in their midst. I was so blessed to have been able to spend that Christmas in that humble place with them. In fact, I would go as far as to say this, it is one of the most wonderful Christmas’ that I’ve ever had and I’ve never forgotten Holly.

You know something, here’s what I think: if Jesus had a choice between attending the big flashy service down at the cathedral, in the town or down at the big church that I attended, if He could go to one of those or come to that humble little gathering in the room in the nursing home, my hunch is that He would have chosen the latter.

I’ll tell you why I think that. Because on that first Christmas, He didn’t choose a palace, He didn’t choose a cathedral or a temple or a synagogue as the place of His birth. Remember, He was the Son of God. The only person, in history, who could choose the time, the place, the circumstances of His birth, He didn’t choose any of those. He chose a humble, little, lowly stable.

And when that Boy grew up, He hung out with the prostitutes and the rejects and the sinners and the marginalised mostly, not the religious establishment. He chose simple fishermen and tax collectors as His disciples, not the top graduates of the local seminary or the top business leaders. He chose shepherds to come and worship Him that night, not kings and queens and governors and presidents. And the angels told the shepherd in the field to look for this sign:

‘You’ll find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’

This Jesus chose the most humble of circumstances for His birth and as you look at His life, He chose those same humble people and humble circumstances for His life. This Jesus came for you and me, not for the big Christmas celebration.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t mistake what I’m saying but that’s not the only place where Jesus is to be found. On this big day, on His birthday, Jesus is to be found in the little places, the humble places. The lonely lounge rooms of the elderly who have no one. In the home of the single mother who can’t make ends meet. He’s to be found in the humble lean-to in the refugee camp. He’s to be found in the slum where the children are dying.

Jesus, this child wrapped in rags, lying in the animal feed trough, the manger; this Jesus, this saviour of the world on this, His big day, the big celebration; He’s to be found in that nursing home with the lonely and the lost and those who are left behind.

Jesus came for me, He came for you. He came for Holly, He came for everyone who might think Jesus couldn’t have possibly come for me, He came for you and that’s what Christmas tells us.

If you’re going to have a big celebration – great, have a big celebration but Jesus came to be in the lowly places as well. That’s Christmas! That is Jesus!

Well here we are, the day after Christmas. Probably taking a breather from the big celebration. But … as we do that, I wonder, what was going on in Bethlehem, what were Mary, Joseph and Jesus doing … the day after that first Christmas.

I don’t know about you, but the day after Christmas, which in many parts of the world is known as ‘Boxing Day’, is for me a day of rest. See, Christmas day was Church and family and celebration and Christmas lunch and maybe catching up with some other family members over dinner in the evening.

But this ‘Boxing Day‘ thing is the day after that. It’s a day to rest and to recuperate, that’s a pretty common thing. But I wonder, I wonder what that day after was like in that little stable in Bethlehem, a couple of thousand years ago.

I wonder whether Mary and Joseph were kicking back without a care in the world, taking it easy. Not likely. Their baby had just been born and even if it had been a text-book birth, Mary was sore and tired. There they were in that unhygienic little place. Do you think she had a hot bath and a nice cup of coffee or a croissant? I don’t think so. More likely they were sitting there, in that little stable, wondering what was going on.

Here they were in Bethlehem, a long, long way from home. Not by their own choosing but because of the Roman decree of the census. Mary’s been sleeping rough in the stable, on the ground. At best she might have had a bit of straw to soften the ground. Angels had appeared to them both, told them that this Jesus was going to be special but they didn’t really know what that meant.

And as we saw last week on the program, it turned out Jesus was born into a brutal, brutal world. Not long after, the wise men came from the east and King Herod heard about this, this new messiah, the King of the Jews. He was thinking about the threat to his throne and he tried to assassinate Jesus. Mary and Joseph fled into exile with Jesus, in Egypt and all the infants under two years of age were slain in an ethnic genocide of the most horrific kind.

So there wasn’t a lot of time for Mary to kick back in a soft pink dressing gown and fluffy slippers and get used to being a new mum and getting into the feeding and sleeping routine. I wonder what that day was like for them.

One part of the Christmas story that we haven’t focused on over these last couple of weeks, is how people responded to it. We talked about Herod’s response of course but there were two other groups of people who came and responded to Jesus – the shepherds and the wise men. It’s interesting. These are book ends of the social structure. Every day working folk on the one hand, these shepherds in the field and on the other, contemporary, secular, humanist prophets, wise men. God called them both to respond to His Son.

Let me ask you a question. How do you respond to His Son this Christmas? While we ponder that one, let’s take a look at the shepherds and the wise men. Let’s see how they responded. These shepherds, as I said, were ordinary working folk. Having an ordinary day at the office, tending their sheep in the field and there was these angels and a light show. We had a look at this the other day. It’s Luke chapter 2 beginning at verse 10:

The angel said to them, ‘Don’t be afraid. For see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people. To you is born this day, in the city of David, a saviour who is the Messiah and the Lord. This will be the sign for you. You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in the manger.’ And suddenly, there was with the angel, a multitude of heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace among those whom He favours.’

 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let’s go down to Bethlehem and see what this thing that has taken place is about which the Lord had made known to us.’

So off they went. They get down to the stable and what do they do?

They went in haste, found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told to them about this child and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds had told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told to them.

The shepherds were very privileged, they were there. The angels pointed them to this stable, they saw Jesus. What do they do? What’s their response? They went back to their work and their lives, glorifying and praising God. Their natural response to Jesus, their natural response to Christmas was to praise and worship God.

I wonder, what’s our response when we see Jesus? What’s our response to this Christmas? How about the wise men, how did they respond? Matthew chapter 2, beginning at verse 9:

When they’d heard the king, they set out and there, ahead of them, went the star that they’d seen at it’s rising until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the place, they saw the child with Mary, His mother and they knelt down and paid Him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered Him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

What was the wise men’s response? Well, in their own way, it was the same as the shepherds. The wise men worshipped Jesus, the Son of God. Even though they’d stopped on their way to see King Herod, here it say’s:

They paid Him homage.

They got down on their knees, they knelt down, they worshipped Him and they worshipped Him not just with their bodies and their hearts but also with their gifts, with their treasure chests. They offered Him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Out of their joy, they worshipped Jesus and gave Him gifts.

See, the shepherds and the wise men did exactly the same thing. Whether they were wealthy or working class, it came down to this. Joy filled their hearts at seeing Jesus and their natural response was to worship Him and tell people about Him.

That’s the real response to Christmas. It’s the response that tells us that Christmas has really, really had it’s impact on us. For our hearts to overflow with joy and that joy flows out of us as worship. How do you and I respond to Christmas?

Okay, so we’ve had Christmas, now what, what comes next? What comes next is the people touched by the Christmas message, who do the one thing that happens so naturally when we bump into God. We worship Him.

It’s interesting, when Jesus was a grown man he bumped into a Samaritan woman at the well. Now, Samaritans were enemy’s of Jews, they didn’t talk and this woman in particular, had had a seedy life. This is what He said to her, John chapter 4, beginning at verse 23:

He said to her, ‘Woman, the hour is coming and it’s here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeks such as these to worship Him. God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’

See, God is the God of love. It’s why He sent His Son. It’s why we have Christmas and the response that He’s looking for are people who want to worship Him. Not out of some ritual, ’cause that’s what the woman was talking about. She was talking about where and how people worshipped and Jesus was saying, ‘No, no!’

It’s not about how and when, it’s about spirit and truth. It’s about letting that joy well up from deep inside, letting it flow in the most natural, selfless expression of our thanks and awe at what God’s done … the expression of worship, lifting God up above us. Singing and thinking and praying and shouting out.

You know what I think one of the biggest problems is that we face here in the 21st century? We have forgotten how to worship God; to worship God in spirit and in truth. To look at this wondrous story of God’s engagement of us through His Son, Jesus, (that’s what Christmas is about) and then, to let that touch us deep inside. When we do, you can’t help it, you just have to worship Him, you’ve got to let it come out.

Okay, so Christmas is over. Done and dusted basically for another year. I hope you and your loved ones had an awesome Christmas. But standing back from it … so what? What did it all mean? What does it mean to you … today?

I had a disturbing experience recently. It’s sad and disturbing. I was sitting with a bunch of people, good people, good-meaning people; people who believed with all their hearts, in God, in Jesus. They were sitting at, what Christians call, a Bible study. They had the Bible open, they were studying a particular chapter. They dissected the words and the sentence structures. They looked at the chapter this way and that way. They looked at what the writer was trying to say, at the time, to the people he was writing to. All the right things and when they thought they had the answer to that, they stopped.

Now I was waiting for the next bit. What next bit? You might ask. Well the bit where we talked about. Well, what does all this mean to us, I mean here and now, 2,000 years on. The stuff we just read, we chopped it up, we figured it out, this way, that way but, well, so what? What does it all mean? What does it mean to me today and tomorrow when I go to work? Is this stuff meant to make a difference in my life and if not, why are we here? Blank looks all round, it was disturbing and it was sad.

I don’t know where you are in your life, whether you call yourself a Christian or not; whether you believe in Jesus or not. But this is why the story that I just shared with you really bothers me. See, I figure if God’s God, if He’s meant to love us the way He loves us, shouldn’t He have something relevant to say in our lives? I mean, life is a thing that you and I live an instant at a time; the things that we feel and say and do and touch and taste and experience.

My life is getting up and having breakfast and going to work and doing all the stuff I do. And coming home and eating and sleeping and exercising and laughing and crying and watching TV and going to the football game and taking my daughter down to the movies. All that stuff, that’s life, it’s the thing that we live, day after day. And I reckon if God is God and if He loves me and He wants to make a difference in my life, well shouldn’t He be a part of my life? I mean shouldn’t He have something relevant to say? Shouldn’t we, as we sit around reading the Bible, which is supposed to be His Word, shouldn’t that reach right into my life, here and now?

Now, if not, why bother sitting and dissecting the words that some guy wrote a couple of thousand years ago? I mean, I might as well have stayed home and done a crossword puzzle, make my own cup of tea. What do you think?

Now, don’t think I’m giving these people too hard a time. We shouldn’t do that. They are good people, well-meaning, with a heart for God, a heart to live their lives for Him. But that session, for me, was like a snapshot of how lost we can become. How, despite going through the motions, we can sometimes just kind of, I don’t know, miss the point.

No more so than at Christmas because we have a ritual to lean on. It’s like a crutch. We go through it each year and it never ceases to amaze me how we kind of switch on the auto pilot and just fly through this thing, doing what we do, every year. And any notion of God, any notion of it having any real meaning can be completely lost.

Can you see my point? We talk about Christmas and we talk about God and yet we keep Him at a distance. We sing some great Christmas carols. We go to Carols by Candlelight, ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘Away in a Manger’. If you’ve ever read the words in those Christmas carols, they are brilliant words of worship and telling us what Christmas is all about. And yet, we can just sing them mindlessly and go through the ritual and let them have no real impact on our lives. Like these well-meaning people, sitting around, studying the Bible, with no sense of what it means to me, what’s God saying to me?

I don’t know what your life looks like right now but mine, well mine has all its ups and downs. Some great things happen some days and other days, there are pressures and tensions and obstacles. Some days I feel on top of the world, other days I experience frustration ’cause I can’t get done what I’d planned. And other days I think, ‘God, why is this so hard today?’ Like I said, ups and downs. I get up every morning and my plan is just to do my best to honour God and in between, the highs and the lows, about 80% of it is just the same old, same old, mundane things of life.

Probably not that much different than what goes on in your life. We each live life in our own way but it has it’s ups and downs and a whole bunch of mundane things in between. Just like those shepherds, sitting there in that field that night, tending their flocks. This was just a normal day at the office for them and all of a sudden, bang, Jesus is born in their midst, the Son of God.

Here’s the powerful thing about Christmas for me. God stepped into our lives; our ordinary, every day, flesh and blood lives, in human form, into the very thing that we live out, day by day, life on planet earth.

See, if He hadn’t done that, I think we’d have an excuse. We could rightly keep Him at a distance. The Bible’s a book after all. Okay, it’s a special book and it’s got great stories and it’s got words about God, even words by God and from God but you can keep the Bible at a distance. And then one day, the Word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us, right in our midst … as a man.

A few years after that first Christmas, the writer of the book of Hebrews, in the New Testament, kind of pulled all that together for me in a few sentences that are so packed with meaning. He’s talking about Jesus as the High Priest, our go-between – between God and us, God and man. Hebrews chapter 4, verse 14, this is what he writes:

Since then we have a great High Priest who passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses but we have one who, in every respect, has been tested as we are yet, was without sin. Let us, therefore, approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace and help in time of need.

This Jesus is not unable to sympathise with us because He’s been through it all. He’s stepped into my life. The Word of God took on flesh and came to my life. How can we keep that at a distance? My God took on my humanity. He suffered everything I have to suffer. He had headaches; He had a cold and He still had to front up to work, in front of the crowds and preach; people misunderstood Him; people slandered Him; they loved Him and hated Him – all the things that you and I go through.

He understands what we’re going through, not just because He’s God and therefore knows it all but He understands because He’s walked a mile or two or three, in my shoes, in your shoes. When are we going to let that hit home? When do we let that make a difference in our lives? Well:

Let us, therefore, approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

See, because of His humanity, we can approach the throne of grace, boldly and honestly and openly. He knows first hand.

It would be an utter tragedy to me if we just skated through Christmas without thinking. Christmas! A time when we celebrate God’s taking on of our humanity. A time when we celebrate and remember that Jesus stepped into my life and your life. A time when we stop and think, ‘Wow, maybe this Jesus came to make a difference in my life today, through this low, or this mundane bit, or this bit of wealth and blessing’. Well, He did! Jesus, in His own words, said:

‘I came that you may have life and have it in all it’s abundance to the full and overflowing.’

That’s what Jesus is all about! That’s what Christmas is about!