A Green Christmas Series

OPEN: Someone has developed a personality test based on how you decorate for Christmas:

• If you have nothing but multicolored lights on your tree – you’re an extrovert.

• If you only use white lights – you’re the type who asks his guests to remove their shoes at the front door.

• But if you use blinking lights on your tree – you have A.D.D..

• If your tree has homemade ornaments – you have lots of children.

• If you string popcorn to put on the tree – you have way too much time on your hands.

• If you use nothing but red decorations – you secretly wish you lived in a Department store.

• If your tree has a VAGUE evergreen smell – you bought a healthy tree

• If it has a STRONG evergreen smell – you sprayed it with Pine-Sol

• If it’s just plain smelly – you probably have a dead bird in your tree someplace.

(Rebecca Munsterer 12/09 Reader’s Digest)

Christmas is a festive holiday, just filled with cheerful decorations and colors. And that’s a good thing, because it sits right in the midst of winter - when the sky is often gloomy, the trees are barren, and the grass is brown. Off-setting this dreariness and emptiness is Christmas, with all its bright colors … red, green, yellow, blue, and white. And it’s partly because of those colors that Christmas is such a joyful holiday.

And so, this month, we’re going to focus on the colors of Christmas, and this Sunday we’re looking at the color Green.

At Christmas, the color Green is just about everywhere. It’s in the garlands and the wreathes … and of course, it’s in the Christmas trees as well. It’s a color that cheers you up and speaks of the promise of life and hope.

And one of the reasons green is used at Christmas is because it speaks of a time to come - a time called Spring. A time when flowers bloom, trees blossom, and the grass becomes green again.

Christmas says – new life is just around the corner.

And, at just the right time, life will replace the death and decay.

Galatians chapter 4 says that’s what happened when Christ was born. “… when the time had fully come, God sent his Son…” Galatians 4:4

When the time was right – God sent the promise of life into a world filled with death and decay.

Now, what does Galatians mean by saying “when the time had fully come”? It means that God had spent a great deal of time setting things up for Jesus to come in the flesh. The birth of the baby in the manger had been planned for centuries.

In the Bible we’re told that back at the beginning of time, when Adam and Eve had sinned in the Garden, God came down and confronted them and pronounced a curse upon them. But then God turned to the serpent who had tempted Eve, and He promised him:

“I will put enmity (or hatred) between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he (the offspring of a woman) will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Genesis 3:15

In other words: when the promised child was to be born, He wasn’t going to be the offspring of a man and woman. This child was to be the offspring of a woman. God tells Satan that the conflict will be “between your offspring and HERS.” Thus Isaiah 7:14 prophesied: “The virgin (a woman who’s never slept with a man) will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”

This child was not going to be the offspring of man and a woman. He was to be born of a virgin.

The 2nd aspect of that prophecy in Genesis was that this promised child would suffer pain (his heel would be crushed) – but in the process, He’d give Satan a mortal blow from which he’d never recover (his head would be crushed). That’s what took place when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and rose from the grave on the 3rd day.

And that was just the first prophecy: that when the time had fully come – a promised child would be born to take away the power of Satan. Again and again, throughout the pages of Scripture, God predicted the coming of a “Messiah”.

God proclaimed:

• where this He would be born.

• when He would be born

• how He would live/ how He would die

• and what He was being sent to do.

There were over 300 direct prophecies and 100s veiled hints of what this Messiah would be like and what He would do.