Faith and Values: Christmas gifts are are not ends but byproducts of relationship with God

It happens every year.

And every year it surprises me.

Every year after Christmas I place perfectly working strands of lights in a storage bin for safe keeping in the garage. Then I take them out 12 months later to find them not working.

Why don’t they last?

Many of us find the far brighter blessings of Christmas – joy, generosity, hope – equally short-lived. Such warm gifts to our souls are transitory; they appear and disappear like calendar pages.

Why don’t they last?

The incarnation is God’s loud declaration that it does not have to be this way. God, in the coming of Jesus, makes clear that we need not settle for fleeting feelings of divine presence.

Jesus is Immanuel, God with us.

When the Christ Child was born – His birth as real in human history as yours and mine – God gave visible, tangible proof that His delight is not merely to rule over us, but to live among us, to live with us.

I mention human history because we are meant to consider Jesus’ birth in the context of real human history. Since the beginning, God has promised to reclaim a world created in perfection, but tarnished by sin, to restore people made for His glory, yet alienated from Him by sin.

This promised reclamation and restoration has been repeated and clarified throughout history.

Here’s just one example: Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, God said through a prophet named Isaiah, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.”

The birth of Jesus did not merely repeat and clarify God’s promise to reclaim His world and restore His people; Christ’s birth culminated this promise. It’s why we still mark history in relationship to the coming of Jesus (B.C. – before Christ, or A.D. – anno Domini, in the year of our Lord).

In a couple of weeks, some of our stores will open seasonal lines at their cash registers for gift exchanges.

People exchange gifts they’ve received for lots of reasons, not the least of which is a simple preference to have something else. Imagine the awkwardness of seeing the person who gave you a gift as you wait in line to exchange it!

The Christmas season is obscured with a similar awkwardness. All the lights and trees and cookies can, for some, conceal a strong preference to have something or someone other than what God has given – Himself.

Jesus entered our world from the darkness of a womb and left our world raised from the darkness of a tomb to give us what we most need: reconciliation with God. He was born to live the sinless life we’ve failed to live, and then offer that perfect life in exchange for ours at Calvary.

Have you received Him?

You know, I still can’t figure out what happens to my Christmas lights once they’re placed in storage.

But I do know why the season’s greater blessings are so temporary.

All those gifts to our souls – joy, peace, hope, love – are not ends in themselves, nor achieved on our own; they are byproducts of restored relationship with God through faith in Christ.

Let the incarnation – God clothed in humanity, born of a virgin – remind us that there is nothing we can do for our salvation, it must be a work of God.

Let the incarnation remind us that Jesus did not come to be remembered briefly each year and then stored away.

Jesus came to be God for us on the cross, so that He might be God with us the rest of our lives.

Steve Massey is pastor of Hayden Bible Church. He can be reached at (208) 772-2511 or steve@haydenbible.org.