For us, Christmas is a birthday party. It is the day that we celebrate the birth
of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died on the
cross to reconcile us with God. Why would we need that? Consider this very simplistic
scenario. Imagine you have a friend that is consistently being treated poorly by
someone. In addition, your friend has gone out of their way to help this particular
person who keeps turning right around and abusing your friend. What advice would
you give your friend? Most of us would at least suggest to our friend that they
get that person out of their life. Some might even suggest that they do something
to get back at the person who has been treating them poorly. We would expect our friend
not to tolerate someone treating them that way.
Now, the Creator of the Universe and all mankind is consistently treated poorly
by all of us. He only asks that we trust him and obey the commands he gave us, which are for our own good anyway.
His commands? Jesus summarized all of God's commands into two statements. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind," and "Love your neighbor as yourself."
He created us, so he knows exactly what is best for us. Of course, we don't see it that way. We want to do things
our own way. We want to be in charge. Trusting him is not what we want to do, and
we think we know better. As a result, we treat him very poorly and we do not do the
one simple thing he asks of us. Trust and rely on him. What should we expect him to
do about that? Well, he loves us so much that he doesn't want to be out of our lives,
and he doesn't want to see us suffer because he is not in our lives.
He gave us a way out, even though he knows that we will keep on treating him poorly.
He asks that we believe in his son, Jesus, who was given to us as a way to make things right with him.
He gave that gift to us, no matter how many times we do things that hurt him.
Of course there is much more to it than this, but we wanted to give a basic example and hopefully we haven't come up too short.
A great book written by Chronicles of Narnia author, C.S. Lewis, named Mere
Christianity is one of our favorites if you'd like to read a "non-preachy"
book from someone who was once an atheist and found Christianity to be the answer
for him.