Christmas EARLY Morning - not your normal Christmas Blog

Reposted from Monday, December 25, 2006

Okay, well, it's 4:21 on Christmas morning. I haven't gone to sleep yet because I am, you guessed it, sick. That's okay, though. It's giving me a chance to blog something.
For those of you who weren't there at Nexus at Crossroads Wednesday night, I talked about God as Creator. I just figured I would blog part of that message, not because it's such a great message, but because I think it's important to know that God is our Creator and to know why He created all of us. Next time you feel yourself getting upset or frustrated with your fellow man or woman, reread this and think about how we are God's lovegift to His Son, and that is what makes us special. Here is part of my message:

Genesis 1:1-3 says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light."

God spoke, and it was. God's voice created light. Seven more times God spoke the words "Let there be," and something was created. In this way, God created day and night, sky and sea, land and oceans, vegetation, stars, fish, animals, and finally, the crowning glory of His creation, man.

God wasn't the only part of the Trinity that had a part in creation. God spoke, and it was, but John 1:1,3 says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being." Who is the Word? John 1:14 says, "The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." The Word is Jesus.

The Holy Spirit also played its own role in creation. God chose to make man differently than He made any other part of creation. God spoke everything into existence, but He chose not to speak man to life. Genesis 2:7 says "Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." The Hebrew word for breath is ruach, and it can also be translated "Spirit." In other words, it was the Holy Spirit which was breathed into man, and it was the Holy Spirit which actually gave man life. God spoke the world into creation, through Jesus all things came into being, and it was the Spirit that was breathed into the first man to bring him to life.

Now, let me ask a simple rhetorical question. That means you don't answer. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, self-sufficient perfect God, meaning He can do anything, knows everything, and doesn't need anyone else, why would He create a limited, imperfect man to live in a limited, imperfect world? It is obvious that God doesn't need us. He existed for eternity past without us, so it isn't our existence that made Him God. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. The glorious truth of the Gospel is that God doesn't need us, but that GOD WANTS US AND LOVES US!!!

The answer to this question is oddly enough bound up in the question of who God really is. The question of God's perfect love answers the question of why He created us. I've talked before about the Trinity of God, and Dustin spoke in September about how God is named Elohim, which is plural, but here's a brief summary of the Three-In-One.

God the Father has existed since before the beginning of what we call time. Before anything was created, God was there, and it's incredibly hard for us to understand this because we are bound by space and time, but trust me that God has always been.

God is perfect, and therefore the best thing God can do is to love and glorify Himself. In fact, God loves Himself so much that there has to be a separate personality of God to love. This is God the Son—Jesus. Jesus is not a separate being, he is simply a second personality of God to whom God the Father can express His love.

God the Father loves Jesus so much, and Jesus loves God the Father so much, that their love is so powerful it becomes a third personality—the Holy Spirit.

At some point in "non-time," God the Father chose to give a gift to God the Son. This gift is what we call "a redeemed humanity," and it means that God the Father was going to give Jesus a group of men and women who, although they x`disobey, would turn their hearts toward God and choose to love Him and glorify Him. If you are a Christian, if you have chosen to devote your life to loving Jesus and following him, then you are a part of this redeemed humanity.

Jesus readily accepted this gift and decided that, since God the Father is so glorious and majestic, that at the end of time, Jesus would take this love gift and lay it down at the feet of God the Father and worship Him, along with all of creation.

But there was a catch for accepting this gift. Jesus would have to join creation, become a man, live a life like men live, but suffer unlike any other person has ever suffered. Jesus would not only have to live as a human being, but He would also have to be separated from God the Father for a time, in order for humanity to be redeemed and rejoined with God.

And Jesus did it. The Word of God, by whom all things were created, became a part of his very own creation. God the Son stepped out of eternity and into time.

For thousands of years, many people have believed that he would come in all of his splendor and glory, but Jesus chose to come in his humility and meekness. Only a very few people realized that the coming of their Savior had taken place. The shepherds were told by an angel; the same is true for Mary and Joseph. Only a man named Simeon, who knew he would see the Christ before he died, and a prophetess named Anna, who was 84 years old and served in the Temple night and day, were aware that the baby they were holding was the One they had been waiting for. Most people missed his coming because they expected something far more extravagant than the way God the Son chose to enter our world.

So Jesus was born. He was born to a young woman named Mary. She was just a teenager, and wasn't even married, and it happened in a town called Bethlehem on the other side of the planet. God became man. The Creator became creation.

As all of you know, and most of you are incredibly excited about, Christmas is next week. As I've studied all those over the past few weeks and months, I've started to see Christmas in a different light. Of course, we all know that Christmas isn't really all about us getting and giving presents. But God has been showing me a new way to view Christmas. We've all been told that Christmas is really about God giving us the wonderful gift of His son, so that we can have salvation and renew a relationship with the Creator of the universe, but I think it's even more than that. I think Christmas should also be a time when we celebrate the fact that, as Christians, we are part of God the Father's ultimate gift of love to God the Son, and at the end of time, we get to be a part of God the Son's ultimate gift of worship back to God the Father. Christmas isn't about giving gifts to each other, and I don't think it's even about God's gift to us. I think Christmas is just like everything else in creation. It's about God's love. It's about His goodness. It's about His glory.