Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem
21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us).
Matthew 1:21-23
Q: What is the chief end of man?
A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism
“No single drawing, painting, photograph, or verbal description could ever capture glory. Glory isn’t so much a thing as it is a description of a thing. Glory isn’t a part of God; it’s all that God is. Every aspect of who God is and every part of what God does is glorious. But even that’s not enough of a description. Not only is he glorious in every way, but his very glory is glorious!”
Paul Tripp, “The Doctrine of Glory”
“Dear Abba, It’s not hard for me to accept You as Father and Savior and Lord and Master. But when it comes to Friend, it’s just not as easy. It oughta be, but it’s not. The thought that You would want to spend time with me and dine with me and walk with me and be my Friend? That You, the Lord of Glory, would want to be the guest of me, a sinner? That leaves me undone. Simply undone. So I finish this day with that thought being the final one for the day—You, Jesus, want to be my Friend.”
Brennan Manning, Dear Abba
“If I am told over and over to repent, to change, to orient my life to God, nothing will ever happen. I will cling to the Gucci luggage—not that I could afford it—and the earthly status symbols more desperately than ever. I don’t need to hear exhortations to repent. I need power from outside myself to make me different . . . A power from outside is coming, a power that is able to make a new creation out of people like us, stones like us, people who have no capacity of ourselves to save ourselves.”
Fleming Rutledge
“How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality of the world, or it is a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful playacting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between.”
N.T. Wright
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Zechariah 9:9
“Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading. The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.” Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.”
—Frederick Buechner
Irenaeus on the Incarnation: “In His immeasurable love, He became what we are in order to make us what He is.”
(Against the Heresies, V, Preface)
In other words, embrace the madness of the season. Bellow out the off-key carols. Smile at the silly reindeer. Empty your pockets into the Salvation Army kettles as the Santa’s ring their bells. Slip on icy walks with your arms full of presents. Load the tree with lights. Pray not in despair or supplication but in wild thankfulness. Rejoice and be merry, set sorrow aside: / Christ Jesus our Savior was born on this tide. —Joseph Bottum
That is my prayer for you this Christmas — that you would experience the fullness of Christ; that you would know in your heart the outpouring of grace upon grace; that the glory of the only Son from the Father would shine into your heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ; that you would be amazed that Christ can be so real to you. —John Piper
