Two Christmas Devotionals from the Advent Devotional Series

The Christmas Plan
by Mike Fabarez


Christmas was required in God’s plan because the righteous life he requires was not attained by Adam or any of his fallen descendants. God, prompted by grace, chose to fulfill the holy human standard himself. The incarnate Deity chose to live the life we should have lived – the perfect childhood, the spotless teenage years and the righteous adult life.

Had we been able to present to the Father the righteous life he requires so that we could perfectly enjoy his presence and his presents, God would not have needed to become a man and live among us. But we couldn’t, so he did. Were it only our sins that needed a payment, Christ could have arrived on the day of his crucifixion. But our deficiencies were more than our acts of transgression (doing the things we shouldn’t do), our problems included the “Romans 3:23” (failing to do the things we should do).

It is with gratitude that we celebrate his advent as an infant, because we know that as our sins were atoned for on the cross, so it was that all our human deficits began to be rectified by one perfectly-lived life starting that very night in Bethlehem.
-- Pastor Mike


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The Audacity of Christmas
by Mike Pohlman

So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future--all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's. –1 Corinthians 3:21-23

This Christmas millions of children (and adults) will find under their Christmas tree a Wii or Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. When the wrapping paper is ripped and the contents revealed shouts of joy will fill the room. (I’m planning on this as our kids open their Wii!) Each of these game consoles will bring countless hours of pleasure to the players. But as amazing as these machines are, they in no way compare to the audacity of God’s gift given at Christmas.

Consider the staggering promise of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:21. He says, “all things are yours” by virtue of being in Christ. And what does Paul include in “all things”? Things like the world, life, death, the present and the future. Breathtaking. How can this be?

Galatians 4:4-7 shows how the Christian comes to inherit “all things.”

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Christmas marks the “fullness of time” when God, in his sovereign freedom, “sent forth his Son.” The One who dispenses times and seasons determined that it was time to send forth the Son who had existed with the Father from eternity. Indeed, the second person of the Trinity “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6-7). He was “born of a woman, born under the law.” Here we have the wonder of the Incarnation: God of very God assuming a human nature.

Why would the Son of God take on flesh and dwell among sinful mankind? Why would divinity take on humanity and “become obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8)?

He did it to secure salvation. In other words, “to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:5). Christ came into the world not only to free us from the tyranny of sin, death and the devil, but also to crown us with unimaginable glory.

It is true that at the Cross Christ “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). But we have not been saved only in this “negative” sense. We have been adopted into God’s family and given all the rights and privileges of legitimate heirs. Paul captures this beautifully in 2 Corinthians 2:8-9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” And the riches that are ours in Christ are far greater than anything merely monetary. These riches are in fact “all things” for “all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:23). This is the audacity of Christmas and it is intended to redound “to the praise of [God’s] glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6).

Intersecting Faith & Life: This Christmas I want to think and live as one adopted. One way to do this is to let every gift given to a loved one serve as a pointer to the Gospel. And when we consider how excited we are for the new Wii or Xbox or Playstation with its temporal pleasures, let us remember the eternal weight of glory that awaits the heirs of the King.