CHRISTMAS LOVE


For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
(John 3:16-17, NIV)



Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

Hamilton Wright Mabi


Best of all, Christmas means a spirit of love, a time when the love of God and the love of our fellow men should prevail over all hatred and bitterness, a time when our thoughts and deeds and the spirit of our lives manifest the presence of God.

George F. McDougall


Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.

Phillips Brooks

(Forwarded by Glenn Hascall,
The Barnabas Chronicles,
www.kcmi.cc/articles.php?category=barnabas)

CHRISTMAS TREE


[Zechariah said] “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago)." (Luke 1:68-70, NIV)


As Christmas draws near this year, I find myself searching for those few parts of the season that actually point to Christ.

We are surrounded by gaudy displays of lights, greedy appeals from stores, and Santa-suited men sitting under fake evergreen trees. I don't need to tell you what would happen if a store dressed an employee up like Jesus and had Him greeting customers.

I picture wide-eyed tots sitting on His lap saying, "Please heal grandma's rheumatoid arthritis, find Uncle Mike a job and help Aunt Clarissa with her drinking problem."

The Christmas carols still mention Jesus (oh, not Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but others). But society seems to leave it up to us to find Christ in Christmas more and more.

This year I'd like to put Christ back in the Christmas tree.

Of course, there were no Christmas trees in the little town of Bethlehem. They aren't mentioned in the Bible. As near as I can figure, they started showing up in the 1500s in the Alsace region of Germany -- possibly as a combination of the "paradise tree" sometimes depicted in early plays about Adam and Eve and the Christmas lights popular in the late Middle Ages.

The Christmas tree has been criticized by some.

Lutheran theologian Johann Dannhauer wrote about it in "The Milk of the Catechism," calling the Christmas tree "child's play."

"Far better were it to point the children to the spiritual cedar-tree, Jesus Christ," he wrote.

But that isn't really such a stretch, is it?

The trees in the "paradise plays" were adorned with apples to signify the sin of Adam and Eve. The plays typically ended with the promise of the coming Savior and His promise of eternal life. The fir tree -- or evergreen -- was chosen to symbolize the gift of everlasting life.

The tree also reminds us of the crucifixion of Christ. Interestingly, scripture often refers to His death on a tree, rather than on a cross.

"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed." (1 Peter 2:24)

"The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead -- whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree." (Acts 5:30)

"We are witnesses of everything he did . . . They killed him by hanging him on a tree." (Acts 10:39)

"When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb." (Acts 13:29)

So, this Christmas season, we don't need to get rid of the Christmas tree or the lights. We need only see the tree as a symbol of Christ's sacrifice for us, and the lights as a symbol of Jesus, the light of the world.

Al Boyce
(forwarded by Glenn Hascall,
The Barnabas Chronicles,
www.kcmi.cc/articles.php?category=barnabas)

CHRISTMAS AND HOPE; A TESTIMONY AMID TRAGEDY


This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. (1 John 4:9, NIV)


Dong Yun Yoon of University City, California, will never forget this Christmas. Two weeks ago, his family was killed when a Marine F-18 Hornet fighter jet lost power and crashed into his home.

In an instant, this season of joy become a time of unimaginable sorrow for Yoon. However, his response to the tragedy can only be described as a great gift to all of us.

The plane's engines failed during a training flight off the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The pilot, Lt. Dan Neubauer, tried to reach Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego but wound up safely ejecting from the plane about two miles from the station.

The plane crashed into the Yoon's just-moved-into home. Young Mi Yoon, their daughters Rachel and Grace, and her mother were killed.

While the tragedy was front-page news, what happened next captured the imagination of the country. The next day, an understandably devastated Yoon told reporters that he didn't have any "hard feelings" toward the pilot and that he knew that the pilot "did everything he could."

Not only that, Yoon said, "I pray for him not to suffer for this action," and called him "one of our treasures for the country."

Having embodied grace and forgiveness, Yoon then told reporters what made it possible: "I believe my wife and two babies and mother-in-law are in heaven with God," and he prayed with other family members and
friends.

Yoon's words and actions reminded Adrian Hong, a human rights advocate, of the circumstances surrounding the writing of the hymn "It Is Well with My Soul" - in both instances, tragedy and sorrow were turned into a great witness to the power of Christian hope.

There's another hymn this episode brings to mind - "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" by Charles Wesley. In the last stanza we sing that Jesus was "born that man no more may die" and "born to raise the sons of earth."

While we may not associate Christmas and the Incarnation with our Lord's victory over death, the Church fathers did.

In "On the Incarnation of the Word," Athanasius wrote that it was because all of us were "under penalty of the corruption of death" that the Word took "to Himself a body capable of death." Since the Word "by His one body has come to dwell among" us, "the corruption of death which before was prevailing against [Man] is done away."

As a result of what Athanasius called "His gracious coming among us," "the way up into the heavens" is "made ready" for those, like the Yoons, who put their faith in him.

This "new beginning of life for us" and the graciousness that makes it possible is at the heart of the Christian hope. It consoles us and enables us to be gracious even when our world is falling apart.

It is this hope, born on the first Christmas, that Peter tells us we must always be ready to explain.

Dong Yun Yoon certainly was. For that he has my gratitude and prayers.

Chuck Colson
(Breakpoint,
bwww.breakpoint.org)

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE


To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. (Revelation 2:7, KJV)


In 1974, 14-year-old Rod Bennett was sitting before a television set, mesmerized by an old black-and-white film called It’s a Wonderful Life.

The film, by director Frank Capra, is one of my all-time favorites. Most of you probably know the plot about one George Bailey, who dreams of leaving small town Bedford Falls and doing great things in the world. But he is trapped by a sense of obligation to his family and to the town. After enduring a long series of setbacks and disappointments, on Christmas Eve, George is standing on a bridge, contemplating suicide.

But then an angel appears and reveals to George that, instead of enduring what he had considered a failed, hum-drum existence, he really lived a wonderful life.

Watching this film for the first time, 14-year-old Rod Bennett was overwhelmed. As he writes in GodSpy, “I remember sitting stunned — battered by a bewildering rush of conflicting emotions as the closing credits finished.”

As an adult, Bennett began researching Frank Capra’s life. He discovered that Capra was raised a Catholic in a family of Sicilians who, despite grinding poverty, enjoyed great happiness. Capra “was raised to believe in the Christian faith as the way to understand man and his destiny.”

But there is another side to Capra, Bennett notes: the Capra who studied chemistry at Cal Tech, “the [hard,] science of what things are made of if you take them apart and boil them down. This schooling . . . in an atmosphere of skepticism and insistence on hard proof ensured that . . . the cinema of Frank Capra would be the cinema, not of blind faith, but of doubt” — and doubts resolved, just like science experiments.

As a director, Capra “begins dispassionately and systematically turning up the Bunsen burners of doubt, despair, and tragedy,” Bennett writes, until it’s “so hot that the test simply cannot fail to uncover whether this ‘Capra-corn’ he grew up believing can actually stand as a viable picture of the way things really are . . . or whether it [is] . . . nothing but a comforting fantasy.”

And Capra’s answer? George Bailey, like all of Capra’s heroes, “bet his life on what he believed . . . and what [he] believed was true.” The testimony of Capra, the chemist, is that his faith was not in vain.

But it is this triumph of faith, Bennett writes, that earned Capra the scorn of reviewers — hardly surprising in this era of relativism, when there are no ultimate answers. So today, “Capra’s vision can only seem grotesque and mawkish.”

But as Bennett notes, Capra insists that if we share in his hero’s dark night of the soul, we will be rescued by the hard evidence and the fruit that will have sprung up from the seeds of faith he has planted. Defeat will be swallowed up in victory.

Maybe this is why so many of us, without quite realizing why, love It’s a Wonderful Life. I hope you will watch it this Christmas . . . and talk about the film’s message with your family. As Bennett reminds us, the film echoes the truth of the Gospel: “To him that overcometh I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.”

Chuck Colson