Christmas Message – What’s So Happy About The Holidays

I didn’t start off doing it purposefully, but towards the end of the Season I found myself taking a straw poll to see how many times people said, “Merry Christmas” verses “Happy Holidays”. I was pleasantly surprised to find in our corner of the world people are still saying the much more meaningful, and seasonally appropriate greeting of Merry Christmas.
You see every time I hear a happy holidays, though it might be completely unintentional, the Yule tide Grinch rises up within me, and I have to remind myself not to say to this pleasant and unsuspecting store keep, “What is so happy about the holidays?”
I mean honestly, the “holidays” are marked mostly with terribly unhappy things as far as I am concerned. The intensity of the season I find draining. It is hectic isn’t it. Like just when you think the fall season can’t get any busier, the holidays show up and send everything into a tail spin.
You have to shop with everyone else who is shopping, and wait in lines with people who often have a rather miserable disposition, sometimes like myself.
There is a lot of baking, and decorating, and cooking and don’t get me wrong I obviously love to eat, and will go home for some unbelievably awesome cream bacon on toast, but it is a holiday marked with over indulgence. Over eating and over drinking are the norm.
In addition, don’t raise your hand this Christmas, but how many people over spend each year? I was talking with one fella just last night that works in an electronics retail store who said it wasn’t uncommon for people to drop 5k of Christmas. I wonder how much of that is on a credit card.
Also it isn’t a completely guilt free task is it. As we stress about getting the right gift and making sure we make everyone on the list happy, each year I can’t help but think of the less fortunate who only feel more marginalized on a day like today when there is extra pressure to make others happy through monetary means.
Along with that, the “holidays” are the great intensifier of happiness and also pain. No one wants to get bad news before the holidays, lose a job or worse lose someone around the holidays because it serves to intensify their loss. It’s like bad things can happen but if they happen around the holidays it is ten times worse. You know what I mean.
So when someone says to me, “Happy Holidays”, this year I seriously wondered if they were living on the same planet I am, and if they really meant what they were saying.
Now before you start singing, you’re a mean one mister Grinch, you’re heart is full of holes, you have spiders in your brain and garlic in your soul, let me say this. I do love Christmas, and am always happy to say Merry Christmas in hopes that the person to whom I am wishing this too would fully understand how unbelievably awesome Christmas truly is.
It’s true I love the carols, and the family time and decorating the tree and being with my pretty wife and my beautiful kids. I love it all, but most of all I love the gift exchange. And by gift exchange I don’t mean the presents under the tree that we unwrap. I mean Christmas brings into light for me the greatest gift exchange of them all. The one Paul talks about in II Corinthians 5 which says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Did you get that exchange? My sin for His righteousness, that’s the best gift anyone could ever receive. That only happens because of Christmas my friends.
All of this we celebrate, all of this time of year the focus has to come back to someone who actually makes this life worth living, my hero Jesus. It is His birth we celebrate, because without His birth, we would not have His life and without His life we would not have His death, and without His death we would not have His resurrection and without His resurrection we would have nothing. However, because of his birth, life, death and resurrection we have everything!
Your sins can be forgiven, the Holy Spirit, God Himself can indwell you, lead, guide comfort and convict you. Because of Jesus those times of great loss in your life can still be amplified and intensified to great joy because you don’t grieve as someone without hope! Because Jesus exchanged our sin for His righteousness we have hope, hope beyond the grave, hope that is out of this world. Because Jesus exchanged our sin for His righteousness, we have crossed over from death to life, and friends this all starts with what we celebrate today. Christmas, God with us, the saviour born on this day in Bethlehem, and when I think of what Jesus has done for me, I want to sing with the angels! I want to fall down and worship like the shepherds and I want to pursue Him like the wise men. Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace to among those with whom He is pleased.
Friends today you are here to worship Christ, the new born king born of the virgin Mary, and I commend you for that. However, I ask of you two more things this day. In the midst of it all, would you please continue to worship Jesus, remember Jesus and truly celebrate Jesus today, think through again all He has saved you from and all He has saved you to. And secondly as it says early in the passage in II Corinthians that we have been entrusted with this ministry of reconciliation, we have been entrusted with this message that God is reconciling us to Himself through this great gift exchange, and I ask you to think about how you can spread His glory and proclaim His name all throughout Trail, BC, Canada and to the ends of the earth. We have two wonderful Churches represented here with I hope a passion to spread this news about an even more wonderful God, Jesus. People need to know this good news, more of them need to know next year that this isn’t a Happy Holiday, it is Christmas, because it is all about Jesus, and if they will make their life about Jesus, they will know what it is to truly live.
Let’s pray, and then the worship team will come up and sing, Go Tell It On The Mountain, just as I hope indeed we will do as well!

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