Christmas With Luke: Jesus Comes to Those Who Feel Left Out
As we teach Luke’s birth narratives, we can proclaim the lovingkindness of our God, who welcomes those who are often held at a distance.
As we teach Luke’s birth narratives, we can proclaim the lovingkindness of our God, who welcomes those who are often held at a distance.
Our kids may need the reminder that, while these times are certainly challenging, they are not outside the realm of God’s redemption. Sin always leaves us weary because it’s difficult for us to resist the temptation to try and break its chains by our own strength.
For students grappling with increased awareness of the brokenness of the world, an always-Christmas-never-Advent Christianity can seem like a childish solution to an irrelevant problem.
As if things weren’t complicated enough in a normal December, this year we have rising COVID numbers, shorter days, and falling temperatures to add hurdles to our usual Christmas parties.
Longfellow digs beneath his pain to something so engrained in him as a follower of Christ that it has to surface, even in the darkest of times: the Gospel.
Youth need to learn that while they were still sinners, Christ died for them. They need to hear that God so loved them that he gave his Son—who died voluntarily in their place to cancel the debt of their sins.
When we sing this hymn, we are putting ourselves in the shoes of a first century Jew who is longing to be free from exile, oppression, and suffering… Here we are, two centuries later, not needing to stretch our imaginations too much to understand what that longing would have been like.
Christmas isn’t the Hallmark movie of the Bible. The triumph of God and his Messiah over evil is a story we are involved in.
In unconditional love, God not only calls me child but heir to all he possesses. In the light of this glorious truth, my inadequacies fade in importance.