One sight that has become most familiar at Christmas is the arrival of
the Coca-Cola Christmas commercial on television. It isn’t the most profound commercial. It will do its job and remind us
to buy a coke for Christmas, but it’s not like any of us are setting a
day aside to thank God for coke every December. It’s just a commercial;
it just wants us to buy some coke.
As strange as it sounds and if we
are being really honest, isn’t that a little similar to how some of us
(Especially in the “Christianized west”) have started to look at the
story of Jesus birth? We heard the nativity story every year since we
were children. It’s like a simple commercial every December that God
wants to use to try and get us to be a little kinder.
Is this the
“real thing” God wanted to advertize to us when he set Angels in the sky
that sang “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men
with whom he is pleased” (Luke 2:14) or is there a message we have
forgot?
The truth is, Christmas is the story of how a perfect God
laid aside the splendor of a heavenly throne to come a dwell amongst
broken people like you and me. God doesn’t want us to look at the
nativity story like we do the coke commercial, something that comes
around once a year and reminds us to buy into niceties for the holidays,
he wants us to be awakened by it to see the unfathomable depths of his
great love for us.
Christmas reminds us that Jesus gave up majesty
to be our Immanuel, God with us. It is the greatest act of love anyone
will ever show you. Remember this Christmas, that Jesus came so that you
could have a way of knowing and seeing God’s love and that in him is
all the kindness that you and I will ever need.
Andrew Griffiths
