In the beginning was … nothing? A “formless void” (Genesis 1:1)? Yet the Bible says a wind (the breath of God) swept over the surface of the "water" (Genesis 1:2) so there something there ... maybe everything there … the particles ... all the molecules, all of the “substance” of the universe … random … all mixed together. God begins to “call” out … to create … to organize the dark chaos. Like a divine potter, He molds and shapes the universe. First, He calls out light … which He shapes into night and day and then He creates the stars and heavenly bodies. Then He calls out water and shapes the land. And then He really begins to let His created juices flow … designing, creating, and filling His creation with a breath-taking diversity of living plants and animals.
God looks at His masterful creation and thinks about how wonderful it would be to share this Paradise with someone, so He creates human beings … Adam and Eve … to share it with Him. And for a while … we don’t know how long … it was very good.
What is “love” if you don’t have someone to share it with, amen? If I paint a beautiful painting, I can admire it but it’s so much nicer to share the beauty of that painting with someone else, amen? If I compose a magnificent poem or song, I can listen to it and enjoy it … but it’s so much nicer to have someone to share it with, am I right? God was lacking for nothing. He created an amazing, incredible universe. He could have sat back and admired His handiwork for eons … but He knew that love is best when you have someone to share it with, amen? Life is better when you have someone to share it with, so God created Eve so that Adam and Eve could enjoy God’s creation .. so that they could enjoy God’s beautiful Paradise with Him and with each other. And, for a while, it was good … it was very, very good.
Love not only requires something or someone to “love,” love, in order to be love, must be given freely. Love that is forced is not love, it is slavery and God did not create us to be His love slaves … and so He not only gave us the gift of life and the ability to love but He gave us the gift of free will. And it is here, in the Garden of Eden, that the story of Christmas really begins, my friends. In order to understand the heart and soul of Christmas … in order to understand the Incarnation … we need to understand the story of our broken relationship with God.
All of this started with a choice. God, who created the universe, knew what would happen if Adam and Eve sampled the fruit of a certain tree in the middle of His garden. “You may freely eat of every tree of the Garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day,” God warns Adam, “you shall die” (Genesis 2:16).
What was the choice? When the serpent tempted Eve, he told her that Adam and Eve’s eyes would be open and they would be like God, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). The choice, my brothers and sisters, was either to be dependent or independent from God and they chose independence … they chose to rely on themselves and not on God. They wanted to be free to make their own decisions and Satan knew the lure and the danger of free will … choosing to become not only his own master but master of all creation … judging God’s handiwork and claiming that he could do a better job than God and so he sought to usurp God … and he lured Adam and Eve into the same trap as the one that had brought about his downfall … encouraging them to think for themselves, to usurp God … not by taking over the universe but by taking over their own lives, their own hearts. And that is how “sin” … our separation from God began … when we no longer desired to be dependent on God but independent from God … to judge for ourselves what is good and what is evil … to have the freedom to say that men can become women or declare abortion to be good and even boast about it while declaring traditional Christian values as evil. We are very vividly seeing the fruits of free will gone absolutely wild today, aren’t we?
And, unlike Adam and Eve, we aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. When Adam and Eve heard God walking in the Garden at the time of the evening breeze, they hid among the trees. Take that image in for a moment. What a powerful, graphic portrayal of what sin does to us. God, who created this beautiful Paradise comes to share it with Adam and Eve. I can’t image that but isn’t that what we long for, all of us? To be with God, not only in the cool of the evening, but for all eternity? We had that. But Adam and Eve’s choice to “be like God” caused them to hide, to cover up their nakedness … not because they were afraid of what God would see … after all, He created them, knew every cell of their body, knew what they looked like physically naked … but they were ashamed of what they did. The serpent was right. They could see good and evil now and they saw their action, their disobedience for what it was … “sin” … a desire to be independent from God, to make their own decisions … and now they were going to have to bear the consequences of free will, of making their own decisions.
Think about what God says to Adam and Eve. “All right, you want to be independent … you will create others of your own kind … and the pain that you experience creating life and giving birth will remind you of the pain and sorrow that you caused me the day that you broke my heart. You will no longer walk through my Garden and simply pluck fruit from the vines and trees … you will no longer listen and learn wisdom at my feet … but will have to labor and toil to feed your bodies and your minds.”
When God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise, was it a punishment? No. It was love. They made the decision to be independent, to “be like God knowing good from evil” and so, as much as it pained Him, and it pained Him greatly knowing the suffering that would result from their decision, He still held to His promise of allowing us our free will and He expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden, not to punish them but to protect them from reaching out and eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal. If you think things are crazy now, imagine where our egos would take us if we were immortal, amen? There would be nothing to stop us from indulging in every whim and desire, no matter how good or evil. It’s bad enough that we have to live with the consequences of our independence for 70, 80, 90 years … imagine having to live with them forever and ever, amen?
Which brings me to the heart and soul of Christmas and the Incarnation. Christmas is the story of God’s attempt to heal the hurt and the separation that resulted from our decision and not His. He came and walked with us in the wilderness that we made of this world so that we could once again walk with Him in the cool evening of eternity in Paradise.
We are the result of God’s love and, in His infinite wisdom and His gracious and loving heart, He created us to experience that love … to not only receive love but to give love … to not only experience God’s love for us and to experience love for God but to give love to others and for them to love us. We are “hard-wired” for love, you might say. Our love of God should lead to Godly living, living in ways that should please God and show our love for God … and our love for God should shape and guide our every thought, our every motive, our every choice, our every decision. When we recognize who God is, when we acknowledge and accept that we are the result of His incredible love, then we don’t have a problem submitting to His authority because we know that He doesn’t do what He does to bully or punish us or to get some sick pleasure out of dominating us. We submit to His authority because we know that everything that He does, He does it for our benefit, because He loves us. I wouldn’t exist if He didn’t create me. You wouldn’t exist if He didn’t create you. We were created by God’s love and we were created to love God … and that should come as easily to us to breathing. It’s what we were created to do. We were made for God … to be loved by God. And we love God in return … not because He requires it … not because God needs it. We love God simply because He loves us … because we are grateful that He created us … that we not only exist but are aware that we exist, that we know why we exist, and that we can see and think and feel … that we can explore and enjoy His universe, His Garden, in so many personal and powerful ways. We do great things and kind things for the people in our lives because we love them and they, in turn, show their love for us by doing things for us. God shows His love for us in so many ways and it is our experience of His love that should inspire us to love Him … and because He shows us His love continually, that should inspire us to love Him continually. However …
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that He had made humankind on the earth and it grieved Him to His heart” (Genesis 6:5-6).
These words were written to describe the time before God flooded the earth, but I think they could very well apply to the world today, amen? Are our thoughts continually on God? Or are they continually on evil? What would you say is the status of wickedness in our world today? Traces of it here and there? Or great, as in Noah’s day? Does the world delight in serving God, their Creator? Does the world find joy in His joy? Are we obedient and do we willingly submit to the will of God because we trust Him and know that His heart and His desire is that His children grow and prosper?
When asked to summarize God’s law, Jesus said we should love the LORD our God with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds and then we should follow God’s example and love our neighbors … not only as we love ourselves but as He loves them. The very root, the very core, the very heart of God’s law was and still is … LOVE.
If we are hard wired to love as I said earlier, we come back to the original problem, don’t we? Because we have free will, we are free to choose whom we will love, amen? In fact, we’re free to love a great many people or to not love them, right? And we are also free to love God or not. But when we choose not to love God, guess what? It breaks His heart. It grieves Him.
Think about this for a moment. When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden, we tend to picture Him angry … upset that they broke His rule. But I ask you to hear His words in the light of His love. “It breaks my heart, Adam and Eve, that you chose to be independent … to live without my help. It breaks my heart to know what that decision will cost you and what you are both are going to have to go through as a result of that decision … the burden and the pain and the suffering that your decision will bring upon you and likewise all of your descendants who will chose to live independently, rejecting my love and refusing my help.” The more you love someone, the more hurt and pain you will feel at their betrayal and the Bible says that our rejection of His love, our desire to live and do as we please grieves Him to His heart. God couldn’t and wouldn’t force us to love Him but He couldn’t just stand idly by and watch us destroy ourselves either. At first, God thought about destroying the human race and starting over, but He couldn’t do it. Instead, He covered Himself in skin and came into the world as a baby so that He could show us how much He loved us.
In 1979, the iconic singer Bob Dylan released a song entitled “Gotta Serve Somebody” in which he explains:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody. (https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/gottaservesomebody.)
The same could be said about love … you gotta love somebody but the choice isn’t between loving the Lord or loving the Devil … it’s a choice between loving God and loving ourselves. That’s the choice that Adam and Eve made in the Garden of Eden. It’s the choice that we all make a hundred times a day. Do I serve God or do I serve myself? If I choose to serve God, it is because I love Him. If I choose to serve myself, then it’s because I love myself.
The love of “self” is so powerful and so seductive that it can blindly lead us into sin … into relying on ourselves and not on God and replacing the love that we have for God with a love for ourselves … and that kind of love doesn’t love our neighbors as God loves them but loves our neighbors only if they love us … and only if they love us to the level or degree that we feel that we should be loved. Just look around you. We’ve become a culture of victims, everyone crying because they aren’t getting enough love or being loved the way that they “feel” they should be loved and only, as I said before, loving those who love them and then only loving others to get more of the love that they feel that they deserve in return ... choosing the love of the world, which will always leaving us wanting, instead of choosing the inexhaustible love of the One … with a capital “O” … who created us out His love and who still loves us so much that He came into this hurting, broken world to show us through His teaching and through His example and His life the way back to a love … not any love but THE love … that we all so deeply and vehemently yearn and crave.
When we live for ourselves, we will step over God’s boundaries again and again and again because our hearts aren’t motivated by our love for Him. Self-love turns us into tyrannical baby kings and queens who insist on being the center of the universe. We take God off His throne and we demand that everyone and everything, including God, meet our insatiable demands for love and comfort and respect. We become the sovereigns of our own lives. We set our own rules. And we’re obsessed with our own comfort, our own pleasure, and our own happiness … and we expect everyone else to be obsessed with our comfort, our pleasure, and our happiness … except that they expect us to be likewise obsessed with their comfort and pleasure and happiness … and we can and we are living the tremendous chaos and pain that this is causing the world today, amen? It leads to riots. It leads to murder. It leads to greed. It leads to disobedience and rebellion. It leads to selfishness. It leads to suffering and pain and emptiness.
Christmas is about God’s self-less love. God lets us make our own choices but so often our choices break His heart. If you love someone and they turn their back on you, if they betray that love, if they set their love on someone else, it breaks your heart, doesn’t it? It causes your heart to grieve. God’s heart grieves when we turn our backs on Him but it doesn’t cause Him to turn His back on us. He doesn’t give up on us like we give up on Him. He doesn’t wash His hands of us and simply walk away. Instead, God put a rainbow in the sky to remind us of His love and why God sent His Son, Jesus, to live among us and to die for us. This is what Christmas is all about … God’s deep, profound love for us and that His love for us is so great that He will never, ever give up on us. Paul explains it so beautifully in 2nd Corinthians 5. “And He,” speaking of Christ, “died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves” … whoa, did you hear that? “… so that those who live might NO LONGER LIVE FOR THEMSELVES, but for Him” … again, speaking of Jesus … “but for Him who died and was raised for them.” Again, God’s sacrifice was a sign of God’s love for us and recognizing that His sacrifice for us was a show of His love for us should cause us to love Him. “From now on,” says Paul, “we regard no one from a human point of view” … in other words, we don’t love our neighbors just because they love us. We love our neighbor because God loves them and we are called to love them and show them our love for them through our actions just as God shows us His love for us through His actions. “From now on,” says Paul, “we regard no one from a human point of view, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know Him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!” (vv. 16-17).
Christmas isn’t about all the noise and clutter that we’ve heaped on it … although I do we believe that we make all that noise and clutter because we are celebrating this incredible event but somehow the noise and clutter have become a distraction and somehow self-serving and we lose the power and thrust of what happened in Bethlehem 2000+ years ago … that God so love the world that He wasn’t … isn’t … willing to destroy it or turn His back on it but to come, in the flesh, to restore it, to bring us back into the Garden where His heart and ours can commune as one … where our desires are wholly devoted to returning His love … to give to Him as He has given to us … totally, completely, and without reservation or hesitation.
God took on flesh so that He could show us what lies in our hearts … not to humiliate us … not to cause us shame or make us suffer … but to restore us … to replace the love of self with the love of God in our hearts … the hearts that He created … the hearts He designed to be the center and the repository of His love for us … the place from which God’s love would flow out of us … guiding us and directing us and flowing out into this world just as His love flows out of His heart and out into all Heaven and out into all His creation.
Christmas is about God coming and giving us the greatest gift of all … a new heart, a new spirit. “This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel after that time, declares the LORD. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Jeremiah 31:31-33). Though God said this to the Israelites through His prophet Jeremiah, it just as easily applies to the heart and soul and purpose of Christmas. He came after a time to write His laws on our heart and minds and to let us know that He still loves us and that He still wants us to love Him … not because He forces us to but because we want to. He gave us free will and we will always have free will … we will always be free to choose whom we love and whom we will serve but it is His deep and abiding hope that His time on earth … His willingness to rescue us from our free will, our selfishness, our sin, our desire to be independent of Him … would inspire us to repent … to turn back … to want with all our heart and mind and soul to return to Him, to walk with Him, to be with Him.
Jesus showed us through His actions what our love for God should look like. He obeyed His Father because He loved His Father. He physically came into this broken and fallen world, He suffered all the realities and all the temptation and all the consequences of our sin so that we would know the perfect love of God who came to claim His children, who came to bring His children home to be with Him. He took our sin upon Himself and paid the penalty for our sins with His death so that through His actions for us we might have hope and that we might remember that He loves us and because of His love for us we might once again fall deeply in love with Him and stay deeply and forever in love with Him.
Listen, there are times when our thoughts are shaped by our love for God … but not always. There are times when our words and our actions are guided and directed by our love for God … but not always. There are times when God is at the center of our lives … but there are also times when we are at the center of our lives … and there are consequences to our choices. Christmas is a time for us to reflect upon our choices. Christmas is a time to behold the wonder of God Incarnate. Christmas is a time to reflect upon the height and depth and breath of God’s love and the lengths that He will go to to show us His love. Christmas is a time to remember that God doesn’t demand that we love Him but gives us the choice to love Him. Christmas is a time to remember that the Word … with a capital “W” … became flesh and lived among us and because He did that, we have seen God’s glory and we have experienced God’s love through Him. Christmas is a time to remember that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him (John 3:16-17).
Let us pray:
