Why do we celebrate Christmas?

• That’s what we want to consider today.

A Stolen Celebration?

• Skeptics of Christianity point to the origins of Christmas as an example of how Christianity is just a false, superficial religion that

and renamed pagan holidays.
• We’re familiar with the presence of the early church in Rome (per Paul’s letters).
• Christmas was celebrated on what we now know as December 25 as early as the 336 AD after Constantine converted to Christianity. It was known as the Feast of the Nativity. This date was originally observed as the Roman pagan festival known as the Birthday of the Unconquered

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.
• Constantine desired to offer an

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to the pagan festival, thus establishing the tradition that eventually became Christmas.
• While it is true that Christian leaders did strategically place feasts and other holidays around pagan festivals, that doesn’t mean that the Christian celebrations were not

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.
• Two motivations for this:

// God is the Creator of all things and, according to Romans 1, His divine character and invisible attributes are seen and known by all.
// In Acts 17, Paul saw this common ground between the Gospel and certain truths of paganism. He used these points of contact as a bridge to share the Good News about Christ, ultimately showing that Christ is Lord of all.

The Reason We Celebrate

• This

context is the reason we celebrate the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Global Missions at Christmas. We set apart this special offering for two reasons:

// It reflects the reality that

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is the ultimate gift and that all gifts given at Christmas are meant to honor Him.
// It reflects the gratitude that we have for those that gave sacrificially so that we could

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the Gospel. Now we want to give sacrificially so that others might hear. We also want to support those who have the calling to run into the brokenness and lostness with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

• While this is a unique calling for some, it is actually the calling of every Christian in some way, to push back the

with the light of Christ. This is the reason we celebrate Christmas the way that we do.
• Context

// In ancient Greek thought, the Logos was the divine, rational

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that pervaded the universe, very similar to the “Force” in the Star Wars movies.
// Around the life and ministry of Jesus, the Logos was considered by Jewish thinkers to be the intermediary between God and the

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. It was the divine agent of creation, revelation, and order, but was not a personal being.
// Just as Paul did in Acts 17, John sees contact points between these

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and the Gospel. So, he writes with the goal of uniting and explaining ultimate reality. The Logos is not an impersonal force, but a person. He is the Creator, the Light, and the one who holds all things together. In his Gospel account, John sets out to explain that Jesus is the intermediary between God and Creation, sent to accomplish a very specific task, which he describes in vv. 14-18 of John 1.

John 1:14-18 | And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’ ”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

• The Word became flesh >> Incarnation, literally the enfleshment or

of the Logos.
• “dwelt among us” >> literally “

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” or “pitched his tent among us.” The point of the tabernacle in the Jewish mindset was to house the Tent of Meeting, where God met with man face to face. Ray Pritchard notes, “In the Bible three kinds of people lived in tents—shepherds, sojourners, and soldiers. They lived in tents because they never stayed in one place very long. Jesus lived in the “tent” of his humanity for 33 years on the earth because he too was a shepherd, a sojourner, and a soldier. He came to be the Good Shepherd, he came as a visitor from heaven, and he came as the Captain of our Salvation to defeat the devil once and for all.”
• “we have seen his glory” >> D.A. Carson notes, “Up to this point, a reader might be excused for thinking that the glory manifest in the incarnate Word was openly visible—that the Jesus who is about to be introduced by name went around Galilee and Judea with a kind of luminescence that marked him out as no ordinary mortal, as nothing less than the Son of God. But as John proceeds with his Gospel, it becomes clearer and clearer that the glory Christ displayed was not perceived by everyone. When he performed a miracle, a ‘sign,’ he ‘revealed his glory’ (2:11), but only his disciples put their faith in him. The miraculous sign was not itself unshielded glory; the eyes of faith were necessary to ‘see’ the glory that was revealed by the sign. Then, as the book progresses, the revelation of Jesus’ glory is especially tied to Jesus’ cross and the exaltation that ensues (cf. Thüsing)—and certainly only those who have faith ‘see’ the glory of God in the Word-made-flesh in events such as these. There is a hiddenness to the display of glory in the incarnate Word, a hiddenness penetrated by the Evangelist and the early witnesses who could say, We have seen his glory”.

This is what we celebrate at Christmas.

• You have access to

because Jesus came from God to reveal His glory to us.
• You have a

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to make personal the gift of Jesus to those around you. Who has God put you around to be the “in-the-flesh” messenger of the Gospel and the one who is also meant to bring a new family?