The Spirit of Christmas

Resurrected Grief
During this time of year many people will try and recapture the pleasant feelings they experienced as children in anticipation of, and enjoying the traditions of Christmas. For most people this is a fruitless effort. Some will use vicarious means to relive the past while others will make themselves so busy that they can ignore the longing and the ache in their heart. Still others are painfully aware that those feelings are never to be again, lost with so many other wonderful vestiges of childhood. Even many believers will suffer the effect of their unresolved grief over the loss of the mystery of Christmas. Some believers might opt to try and reason away their grief, insisting that the feelings were never real and should then be ignored. Others will try and compensate the loss with love. This might certainly seem the best alternative but regardless of the specific source of grief, all of this suffering is founded in hopelessness. The spirit of Christmas is hope.

Why now?
There are three things God decided should be essential to our well-being, love, hope and faith. Our nature leads us to make substitutions for each of these in order to satisfy our own pride and lust. The deceiver will offer a smorgasbord of alternatives to the truth, all of which are more appealing to our carnal nature. We will accept carnal love in place of the love of God and most often we trust in ourselves rather than Him. With hope it is the same. We place our hope in things that aren’t really there and never will be. This allows us to believe we have some control in realizing our hope and lets us avoid having to acknowledge God as our provider. The traditions of Christmas emphasize hope and that hope is something we do our best to avoid having to question. I cannot assign evil to a tradition or to any other thing, but I do know these traditions are often used for evil, intentionally or otherwise. I suppose you could certainly use Santa Claus to illustrate the spirit of benevolence that is born out of love, I know I’ve tried, - or - you can substitute it for the providence of God, “ask Santa to bring that”. I’ve been guilty of that. “Peace on earth, good will toward men” can be applied annually for a few days in an attempt to squelch the guilt that follows a year of cut-throat, dog-eat-dog business practices - or - you can use this time to tell of His great love and illustrate it in your life throughout the year. Even if you decide to ignore all of the customary practices, the focus on hope will be evident during the Christmas season. Hope for the future is something we all need in order to be happy in the present. Sadly, to many times the things we quietly hope for just don’t exist. There is no easy life and there aren’t always answers for all of our questions as to why so many bad things seem to happen.

Things Hoped For
As children we have no problem hoping for things we can’t understand. We can easily hope that a huge man in a red suit can fit down a chimney or that reindeer can fly, without having to understand how it’s done. As adults we’ve learned not to hope for things we can’t understand or explain. We refuse to accept anything mysterious at all and dismiss it as being childish to believe in such things. Even we as believers reject the notion that there are things in this life we just can’t understand and if no reason is given we’ll create one that fulfills our belief system. “I don’t know” has become a shameful admission of stupidity instead of the rightful and truthful answer to so many of our questions. We are no longer willing to hope for peace on earth and good will toward men unless there are peace talks currently underway. We can’t “see” how God cares for us just as He does the lilies of the field. We only know that if we don’t strive for success we’ll never have anything. Worst of all we’ve refused to have any hope at all for a future we can’t design and create through our own foreknowledge called assumption.

Hope Eternal
We who believe can recapture the wondrous spirit of Christmas and hold it throughout the year. We can accept that the ways of God are beyond our understanding and have hope in things far more mysterious than flying reindeer or an oversized elf.

“Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

“Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

Somehow, someway we will be mysteriously changed and taken up to be together with our Lord forever more. What greater hope could there be than this?

“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.”

Let us find our hope in nothing less than the mysterious promises of God so that our spirit of hope will extend through all the Christmases to come even to life everlasting.