Classic and contemporary excerpts.
God, A Child!
Who would have had sufficient daring of imagination to conceive that God Almighty would have appeared among men as a little child? We should have conceived something sensational, phenomenal, catastrophic, appalling! The most awful of the natural elements would have formed His retinue, and men would be chilled and frozen with fear. But He came as a little child. The great God “emptied Himself”; He let in the light as our eyes were able to bear it.
—John Henry Jowett in
My Daily Meditation
Down Heaven’S Staircase
Christmas is when God came down the stairs of heaven with a baby in His arms.
—R. Eugene Sterner in
Vital Christianity (Dec. 14, 1975)
The World’S Greatest Hope
Have we … reduced the stable scene to some cutesy little scenario that has no meaning left in it at all? Have we lost the sense of awe that there, in that stable, God became man?
What can be the point of Christmas if it is here today and gone tomorrow? For all our celebrations this time of year, why do so many fail to recognize Christmas’s Lord?…
The fact remains that our world never comes as close to being in contact with its greatest hope as it does at Christmas.
—Rick Mylander in the Covenant
Companion (Dec. 1988)
Heart, Not Box
Christmas is the gift from heaven
Of God’s Son given for free;
If Christmas isn’t found in your heart,
You won’t find it under the tree.
—Charlotte Carpenter in Herald
of Holiness (Dec. 15, 1982)
Christmas Without Santa
I’m not sure anyone can experience what Christmas really means without confronting that sense of lost innocence and the potential for disillusionment the holiday can bring.
Only after we truly face up to Christmas without Santa can we as adults begin to grapple with what Christmas is all about.
—Jerry Shinn in the Charlotte
Observer (Dec. 22, 1986)
Christmas Betrayed
Millions of perfectly healthy and worthy men and women still keep Christmas; and do in all sincerity keep it holy as well as happy. But there are some, profiting by such natural schemes of play and pleasure-seeking, who have used it for things far baser than either pleasure-seeking or play. They have betrayed Christmas. For them the substance of Christmas, like the substance of Christmas pudding, has become stale stuff in which their own treasure is buried; and they have only multiplied the sixpences into thirty pieces of silver.
—G. K. Chesterton in the Illustrated London News (Dec. 23, 1933)
Innkeepers For Today
If all Christians did something extra for just one person this Christmas, don’t you think that the holiday would be much nicer, more memorable, and closer to what Jesus came among people for? Imagine how much he would like it if everyone took in a stranger—just like the innkeeper I’ll bet his parents used to tell him about when he was a toddler.
—James Breig in U.S. Catholic
(Dec. 1986)
No Crèche In Our Lives
Many of us have found our sensitivities insulted and our convictions offended as court rulings removed the crèches from the lawns of our city halls. It’s far easier to object to that swipe of secularism than to realize that for years many of us have been living through the Christmas season with, figuratively, no crèche on the front lawn of our lives. Caught up in the swirl and storm of the holiday, who of us has taken the time to proclaim Jesus as the reason for the season?
—Joseph M. Stowell in Moody
Monthly (December 1989)
