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My Personal Journey to Joy at Christmas

Truth in Love 28

Reflecting on the beauty of Christ's birth can cultivate joy amidst difficult memories.

Dec 14, 2015

Heath Lambert: As you’re listening to this, we are right in the middle of the Christmas season, and that is a time in our culture that is billed as a time of great joy. We sing songs called “Joy to the World,” and we sing songs called “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and you’ll see on storefronts and shipping containers even just the word joy written on them. It is a season that is billed as a happy season of the year. And yet, for everyone, that is not true. This can be a very difficult season of the year for many people. I want to talk about how people could come to experience and know joy in the Christmas season when their Christmases have not been a season of joy in their personal life. I want to try to talk about that by letting you know about my own personal story.

My own personal childhood was filled with a lot of sad memories of Christmas. Christmas was not a happy time in our house. My mother became a Christian late in her life, but before she became a Christian, she lived a truly godless lifestyle, and Christmas would often be a hard season for her as she thought about all the things that she would like to have had in her life but didn’t have. And unfortunately, as a mother, my mom was often very unhappy that my brother and I lived with her. And so Christmas was a very painful time; there were things that she wanted to be doing with her life that she was not doing. She viewed in many ways that my brother and I kept her from doing that. And so from the time we were very young, she would make our lives miserable a lot. But most frequently and often most painfully would be at Christmas. My mom was a drunk and would usually get drunk on Christmas Eve and Christmas night. And these would be times when she would really mercilessly abuse my brother and me. Two Christmases in particular were really horrifying. One year she got upset and began to hit me with a mop handle. She began to attack my brother with a gun. And we got out of the house. I grabbed my brother, and we ran out in our bare feet. It was snowy, there were inches of snow. By the time we got to a safe place, we had frostbite on our feet and our legs, and we ended up living in a foster home for months. After that, it was a really awful Christmas memory. Another Christmas memory was years after that when she was also drunk, she’d been drunk for days. We hadn’t eaten, and my mom was passed out in her vomit underneath the Christmas tree when the police came to get us. There were red and blue lights flashing in our windows on Christmas night.

So for the early years of my life, Christmas was just something that I dreaded. I knew that this was going to be a time when my mom was going to be unusually difficult to deal with, and it was going to be a time that was going to be unusually painful for me. And it just wasn’t something that I look forward to, but all that changed when I became a Christian. And one of the texts, one of the realities that changed my perspective on Christmas, from being one of sorrow to one of joy was the passage of Scripture and Luke 2, starting in verse eight. And this is what the apostle says, “in the same region there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not. For behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you, you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.” This is a text that tells us about the true meaning of Christmas, it announces the advent of the birth of Jesus Christ, and it is a text of Scripture that is about joy. It says in verse ten, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people,” and so this is a text that floods the meaning of Christmas with happiness and joy. There are a couple of things that stand out to me and that stood out to me to get me to a new place in how I viewed the Christmas season. One joyful element of this text is that it says, in verse fourteen, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.” This is a text that teaches with the coming of Jesus Christ with the birth of Jesus that the mission of God to bring peace to his people has been inaugurated, and it has begun. Christmas is about God bringing peace to those who had been his enemies. God is not content to stay an enemy with sinful rebels like you and me, but He initiates a rescue plan in the incarnation of God to come and save us and put an end to the war that had existed between God and man. And so, Christmas is a time of joy because it reminds us that God is a God of peace who wants to look on us not as sinners but as his beloved and precious children.

Another reality about this text that is so joyful is that it reminds us that our God is a God who keeps his promises. The Old Testament tells us that the Messiah would be born in the city of David, and it was from that place that God would come as a savior. We read about that in 2 Samuel 13. The Old Testament tells us that that child would be born in Bethlehem, the city of David, in Micah 5:2. And now, here in Luke 2, we see the fulfillment of those promises. God hundreds and hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, told people that something would happen, and in Luke 2, we see that He kept His word. Christmas is about a God who keeps faith with His covenant, He keeps His promises, and we can trust Him because He does what He says He will do.

Another reality that stands out to me about this text as really issuing into joy is that it teaches us that Jesus is a savior for all people. There’s nothing fancy about this. I mean, the angels appear, and that’s overwhelming. But as far as the actual birth of Jesus, it’s a pretty humble affair. Jesus is wrapped in these raggedy clothes, and He’s laid in a manger. He’s born to a couple of modest means. Then the angels show up in the field to these shepherds. Shepherds were a despised class in ancient Israel, their testimony was not even acceptable in a court of law. And yet, God sent His Son, the King of the universe, to be born in a humble situation like that to be witnessed by humble people like these shepherds. If you think about a human king, a human prince, they are born with fanfare, they’re born to fireworks, they’re born in wealth and splendor, but Jesus came to be a savior for all the people. He came to be a savior for you and me, He’s not a king that comes in pomp. He’s a king that comes in humility. And that means little kids like me who grew up in humility and poverty can identify with this Christ who came in rags. And so Christmas is a time of joy, it’s a time of peace between God and man, it’s a time of seeing that our God is a God who keeps His promises, and it’s a time of seeing that Christ comes to be a savior for all the people, not just the rich and the important people, but the poor and humble people.

There’s a very important lesson in this. If we are going to look at our experience of Christmas—to the memories that we have —then we’ll always have a reason to be at least a little bit sad at Christmas. But when we remember what Christmas is really about, when we reflect on that very first Christmas, we will know that it is a reality that defines our reality. The joy that issues there overflows into our lives and brings us joy no matter the despair that we’ve experienced in the past. And so I want to say on behalf of all of us here at ACBC, regardless of the situations that you’re facing this Christmas, regardless of the situations that you faced in Christmases in the past, we want you to know that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. We celebrate His birth at this time of the year, and we are happy to say Merry Christmas to you.