Christmas Eve, John 1, December 2025.
Christmas is Historical, Joyful, Essential…
Prayer: Father Son and Holy Spirit, Come Lord, come down, come in, come among us. Come.
Into our lack of understanding, come.
In our hardness of heart, come.
Into our loss of joy. Come.
Come down, come in, come among us. Amen.
On Sunday All Saints was 10 years old. A couple of our teenagers went around asking people to describe ASA in three words.
How would you describe Christmas in three words?
Years ago, in 2001, this challenge was given to various celebrities in a TV advert by the British Company ‘’Marks and Spencer’’
‘eating too much’ said one actress..
Other suggestions were ‘the Queen’s speech’,
‘’pulling a cracker’’,
and ‘last minute shopping’ – before the inevitable ending of the advert: ‘Marks and Spencer’.
But what about the words ‘Christ is born’ – where do they fit in?
It is easy at Christmas time to become pre-occupied with travel plans to see family, parties, or finally getting to getting to see Avatar 3 at the cinema – that we forget what it is we’re supposed to be celebrating.
The Bible describes the coming of Jesus as an event of massive significance for God’s dealings.
Pastor and writer Tim Keller describes it:
as universe-sundering,
history-altering,
life-transforming,
paradigm-shattering
event of history.’
What three words would you choose to describe Christmas?
Here are the three I have chosen to summarise it – Historical, Joyful and essential.
Those words point to truths that have transformed lives of millions of people throughout the world – and it all begins with Christmas.
Christmas is historical – it really happened.
Many people think of Jesus in the same category as the Flying Snowman or Sinterklaas. We’ve known the story for a while but now we may feel – it just isn’t true…
Jesus wasn’t a mythical character – he really existed. Historians from the time, who were not Christians, mention him in their writings. We can find out more about him as we read the accounts of his life in the Bible. And Jesus grew up to become the most remarkable man the world has ever seen.
There has been nobody like Jesus. He lived a life of astonishing humility, kindness and compassion, He loved everyone, rich and poor, male and female, regardless of race – values I am sure all of us who aspire to live out. He taught as no ever taught. He performed extraordinary miracles– he just said the word and the blind saw, the lame walked and the dead were raised. Yet the religious establishment felt threatened by him and he was crucified when he was only in his early 30s.
If that was where the story ended, his life would be largely forgotten by now but he didn’t stay in that tomb, God raised him from the dead. And people went across the country and then the Middle East and further proclaiming they had met him alive again and were willing to suffer for that truth.
This was no ordinary man, no ordinary birth. Christmas is historical, it really happened.
Christmas is joyful!
While we just sang Silent Night. Heavenly hosts – angels – visited the shepherds. They quaked with fear. But the angel message was: ‘I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people! What is the joyful message?
Does the joy of Christmas really only consist of family visits, gifts, time off.
There must be more to Christmas than that!
The birth of a baby is always a time of rejoicing. Maybe you’ve had a baby brother or sister or cousin born this year. Yet it is hard for us to get excited if we don’t know the parents and if the birth took place in another part of the world centuries ago.
So why rejoice? Isaiah said : Burst into songs together!
The answer – because of who he is…
The angel said to the shepherds:
Today in the town of David, a saviour has been born to you, he is Christ the Lord.
God had acted to fulfil the promises he had made over the centuries recorded elsewhere in the Bible. One amazing promise was, in Isaiah:
The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means God with us.
I read out a few minutes ago:
In the beginning was the Word – a title for Jesus – and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. … 14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. John 1:14
God is not some distant God, he loves us and has come close to us, in the person of Jesus…that baby in the manger, that is God with us.
And that wonder –I lived in Hungary for a couple of years, and the main focus of Christmas is – today – Christmas Eve. The house is not usually not decorated until Christmas Eve – maybe, in some home, not until sun set – then secretly, the parent or parents sneak out and they will decorate the room – while the children are somewhere else – and then, this is what the parents do, they ring a bell – the angels have been is what the children are told – and the children go in and they see this amazing decorated, beautiful room, with the presents etc… the wonder and the beauty of it. The Wow factor.
The Wow factor – Jesus is God with us – the God up there became the God down here – yet he didn’t protect himself from harsh realities… he was born in a manger, not a mansion, not born with public acclaim but quietly in a stable, he was as an adult lifted not onto a throne but onto a cross.
Christmas tells us that God loves us, really loves us.
As the modern carol says: Love came down to Bethlehem while the world was sleeping.
We matter so much to him, that he sent his Son to leave the glory of heaven and to be born as a man among us… Christmas is a time to be joyful – God really loves us and he really cares!
Christmas is essential.
Jesus came to earth not just to demonstrate God’s love, but something that needed to be done for us.
Next year, the 25th anniversary of the release of the LOTR Fellowship of Ring is celebrated. That key moment in the film, who and how will the ring of power be disposed of. Frodo – a Hobbit – will take the ring on a quest because of how important that is for everyone on Middle Earth.
We sang ‘’Christ the Saviour is born.’’ The Angels called Jesus Saviour. Why?
Well, Jesus comes to remove the barrier to friendship from God. The stuff we put in the way of God.
There was a story of a little boy who wanted to play Joseph in the school nativity play but he was given the more minor part of the inn keeper instead. He was hurt, and the boy sulked and waited for a moment to take his revenge.
On the night of the school play, with the school hall packed with teachers and proud parents Mary and Joseph came towards him and delivered their familiar line: is there any room at the inn?
Instead of saying ‘no’ and offering the stable, the boy saw his opportunity to steal the show and with a broad smile – Yes, plenty of room, come on in! Poor Mary and Joseph stood confused, didn’t know what to do next and the production, well, descended into chaos!
There is a bit of that boy in each of us. It as, if God our creator wrote the play, designed the set… our role, to work with his good perfect and pleasing plans he had for us.
But we’re not happy with the plans the role he had for us so did our own thing and so pushed God out, and created a barrier between ourselves and God.
So Jesus is born, and dies, so we can be friends with God, so we can become children of God.
A few days before Christmas in 1991, in my home country and in my home county, 19 year old Robin Farmer – he was only a couple of years younger than me at the time – had just returned home from first term in university in Scotland.
He was working the family shop when a terrorist gunman burst in and aimed a gun at his father – who as a police reserve officer. Robin instinctively dived in front of his father and was hit instead, dying shortly afterwards.
That tragic death and courageous sacrifice reflects something of what Jesus did for us – as Robin’s father can say : My son died for me – so we can say, God’s Son, Jesus died, for us, that is why he came to earth. There was no other way for us to be right with God and to become children of God. Christmas is essential, it really matters.
So what will we do with this gift, this Christmas present?
12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God John 1:12. Can you hear the formula John says:
believe receive become.
Believe the truth of who Jesus is.
Receive him for who he claims to be – Saviour and King
And when we do that, we become a child of God, we are forgiven and adopted into his family…
Conclusion.
Thelma Howard was an American maid who missed out on a fortune because she didn’t look carefully at her Christmas present – so be warned. Her employer was Walt Disney who gave her a piece of paper in an envelope every Christmas eve. Thelma didn’t understand what it was, and so she simply added it to the pile under her bed. After her death, her relatives discovered the documents and realised that they were shares in the Disney Corporation, worth 30 million dollars.
God’s gift – is worth far more than any sum money.
So please let’s not, when we put our cards in the blue bin to be recycled and pack away the tree, pack away Jesus for another year. That’s being like Thelma – we don’t understand fully the present given to us –
that Christmas is historical – it’s real and it happened and Jesus is not a myth;
it is joyful – God shows how much he loves us;
and it is essential – so we can have the chance for all to become children of God…
A few moments … there are little booklets called ‘’Christmas Message’ on our back table to know more.
End in prayer.