Year after year, we celebrate Christmas with the wonder, hope, and joy it inspires, but on December 26th or the moment we open all our presents, it all goes away. The Christmas tree we take into the New Year, but the excitement and wonder we forget about as though Christmas is only about physical gifts when in reality, Christmas is about the greatest gift we will ever receive, about His birth, and the hope we have in Him and because of Him. By God’s Grace, that hope is not fleeting but everlasting, as is our salvation. Christ’s birth is the beginning of our joy and celebration of life, not the end. We are to take it with us into the new year and into every day life is breathed into us.
In my Sunday School a few weeks ago, my father was teaching about joy and defined it in a way that I’d never heard before. He defined it as unbroken fellowship with God, and it epitomized perfectly the accessibility we all have to God.
I think we sometimes perceive joy as this unattainable thing or liken it to happiness when it is so much greater and more powerful than that. It doesn’t mean we don’t encounter hardship in our lives, but what it does mean is when we take the time out to spend with our Heavenly Father, and we die to our flesh to live in the Spirit, we can grow to such a place that the hardship does not define or derail us, and we are, instead, comforted by the Spirit of God. We are comforted by the fact that we are in tune with a God who knows our struggles, who has a portion of Him who has experienced our struggles, and who is working out all things for our good (Romans 8:28). That fellowship enables us to live each day with excitement and anticipation for where God is leading us and grateful that He enables us to be vessels for His plans and will.
I don’t want us to just be excited and hopeful during the Christmas season. It’s the most wonderful time of year, but I think it was perfectly placed at the end of the year – to usher us into the New Year with the hope, wonder and joy that the season inspires in us all, all of which we as Christians should have in our hearts and spirits the whole year anyway.
Every day is a celebration and an opportunity. In a world that seems to grow more dim every day, we still have breath in our bodies by His Grace and we have a purpose that can only be revealed through our Creator as we seek Him. We have a Creator who extended us to Himself in three portions for our benefit, for our salvation, so that we could always access Him, so that we could be lights in a sin-cursed world and illuminate that this life we live, this road less traveled is not only possible, but viable, with the great capacity to transform our lives and us, if we so allow it to. He created us in His image, with a portion of us within Him and if that wasn’t enough, He then reincarnated His own Son to save mankind and saved us by sacrificing His only son. Christmastime is special because it is the celebration of the birth of Our Savior, of Jesus Christ a reminder of the miraculous and benevolent God we serve. But every day, from January to December, we ought to glorify God simply for who He is, what He has delivered us from and for sacrificing His son on mankind’s behalf. We ought to rejoice daily and celebrate life itself, and the privilege that it is to see it daily.
My point is that when we have unbroken fellowship with God, earnestly living in the Spirit and abiding in Him as He abides within us, every day can be Christmas. Every day is a day of hope, of wonder, of peace and a celebration of God’s Grace and mercy. If we live the way God intends for us, seeking Him every day, and with unbroken fellowship, every day is a day of Thanksgiving, even with the difficulty we encounter. Our brother James reminds us to, “count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing”(James 1:2-4). So, even when we encounter hardship, not only is it ultimately for our sharpening and strengthening for the journey, but we have a Savior who was born, a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) that lived so if we should ever not know what to do or how to navigate such hardship, we can look to them and look to their prolific faith to guide us on our journey. We can look to Job, to Joseph, to Mary, to Ruth, to Paul, to David, and to Jesus Christ who paid it all, opening not His mouth so that we’d get to die to our sins, to be made new and whole again, and that we might have not just access, but also reconciliation with the Father.
My prayer for you is that you come to realize, if you have not already, that excitement and wonder you were filled with in the season of Advent, on Christmas Eve, on Christmas Day, that you will have today on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, is available for you every day. God wants His children to possess all the Fruits of the Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23). This is a lifestyle and Christmas is not just holiday but the very foundation of this, our Christian faith and we must stand on it each and every day, and when we do, we will have that unbroken fellowship with God, that joy that we are promised and that is ours for the taking.
