What I Want My Daughter To Know About Christmas
I want her to know it didn’t start with a baby. Nor did it start with Joseph and Mary. They are all part of the middle, but not the beginning– nor are they the end.
The world was created in perfection, with love. All was beautiful, all was good. It was a glorious place where fellowship with God was possible. (Gen. 1)
Yet, the perfection did not stay. With the ability for true fellowship came the ability for broken fellowship. When Eve believed the lie, that all was not good, that God was hiding something from her, the relationship broke.
I want her to know the whole story. Not just about the manger, but about the creation of the world and man’s fall into sin and the God who gave up the glory of heaven for brokenness and betrayal. About His gift, the greatest gift of all.
With sin present, fellowship with God broken, we each enter life. A blackness of soul present that leaves us alone in a world that is no longer good. We are all marked sharp with blood-guilt, emptiness, and pain.
We’ve been born with conflicting desires: the fellowship we were created for and the selfish sinfulness that fights for our allegiance. And the sinfulness will win over our desires for fellowship every time. We’re not strong enough to fight it, not good enough in ourselves.
But then the glory.
God entered. God with us.
He didn’t come with an army, like the people were expecting. He came humble. A peasant-king. Miracles followed in His wake, but they didn’t stop the world– just the world of the few who were watching.
In obscurity He grew. He faced the greatest of trials. He was God. He was good enough, worthy enough, powerful enough to be worshiped, to be fed, to be waited upon by all the angelic hosts of heaven. But when Satan tempted Him, He stood fast.
If Satan could have convinced Him, if he could have tripped up the Emmanuel, the God-with-Us, he would have won. It was pride that crashed Satan from his place of glory, and it was the temptation of pride that could have put the Almighty-God onto the same level playing field as him again.
But Yeshua, God-our-Salvation, resists. The glory rests.
And He walks the humble path to Calvary, carrying the weight of sins not His own. He closes His mouth tight to the desire to command the angels to attend Him, and instead endures the scorn of the men He came to save.
God came and bore the weight of our sins, placing Jesus, with arms outstretched, in the space between Him and us.Christ embraced death that our relationship with Him could be healed. Death brought life. The downward spiral of earth disturbed. And the grave could not contain Him.
Jesus walked away from the pit of hell because He was sinless, and in that moment we were freed.
And then we find the most miraculous part of the story. God-our-Salvation didn’t come with an army because He had something else. Something so beautiful, so breathtaking… He looked at all of us, in our broken fellowship and sin filled hearts, and He saw instead– warriors.
Us. In all our pitiful rags.
Oh, little girl, I tell her, the story is not over.
He’s coming again. With an army to defeat sin and evil and death. And if we choose Him, if we surrender to His-ways, we will be transformed. Just as the peasant-king will someday reign in glory, so will the broken-sinners someday become warriors.
This is what I want my daughter to know about Christmas:
It’s not the beginning, and oh, glory, it is also not the end.
**quotes taken from “The Story of Grace” a piece I wrote for KindredGrace.com