Searching for Jesus amid secular Christmas celebration

The real inspiration at Christmas is that Jesus did not come into a peaceful, pastoral, idyllic world.

Graham goes on to share the single most important thing a parent can do to teach their children the meaning of Christmas: “The most important thing you can do, however, is to help them gain a new understanding of the meaning of Christmas”.

Displaying secular Christmas symbols, singing or playing secular Christmas songs, having Christmas parties and saying “Merry Christmas” are not endorsements of religion and do not infringe on anyone’s religion or lack thereof.

In other words, our greatness and our protection come from God. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. He came to take away the sins of his people (Matt 1:21).

Then I learned that the Lord Jesus Christ is the all sufficient Substitute and Saviour of sinners. We sing because we want to be transported, momentarily, by a vision of what the world would be like if Jesus sat on Cesar’s throne.

We, too, can respond to God and receive the blessing God has for those who seek His way of life. The church has made a major mistake by turning the witness of the light, the messenger of the light, and the carrier of the light into the light. I’d always reply with short answers avoiding any heated discussions. Jesus never screamed at the lost. During what should have been a time of celebration became a time of tragedy.

But deeper than the offensive is the reality that God because of His great love was born of a woman so that we can proclaim that humanity can be born of God. I don’t blame the editor of the New York Daily News because, the church, the same church Jesus declared the gates of hell would not prevail against, has kept Jesus on the bench so long many have forgotten his winning track record.

This holiday season, though, the BYUtv sketch comedy group took their jokes a slightly different direction with a video that serves as the 12th and final day of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ “12 Days of Social”.

Billboard recently released their list of the top 10 rappers of all time and the list created a great deal of controversy because they did not include 2Pac. Mary (the mother of Jesus) and Elisabeth (the mother of John) were cousins to Jesus Christ.

18 Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this?”

For a number of years, I taught English as a second language to adults. Read the Bible. Or better yet, let other people read the Bible for you and tell you what it says’. Put another way, God placed himself “in a box”. The birth of Jesus signals how God, far from being indifferent and unresponsive to our need, has come to straighten what is crooked, to set right what is wrong and to make all the sad things come untrue.

There has been a rising tide of refusal to accept refugees to our shores, an increase in the number of people who are homeless in this country, and an increasing intolerance of the religious practices and customs of others; that certainly speaks against the Christ-Spirit of compassion and justice being alive in the world. Yes, they naturally think about the gifts they hope to get. God so loves us that he became one of us, to experience life as we experience it, from the humble beginnings of birth to the loneliness of death. Your children and grandchildren are wired to learn from you/be influenced by you in a special way – pray for God to show you opportunities to share Him with your family. The word ad-vent comes from Latin; ad means until and vent means he comes, so until he comes. With Jesus on the bench the man was unable to move forward but as soon as Jesus got off the bench the man was able to move forward and enter into his full potential. They seem to need an experiential immediacy not therein promised.