The Gift of God With Us

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It’s almost time to say Merry Christmas, but it’s not Christmas yet. We still await the arrival of Jesus. We have an empty manger here. We have candles lit to remind us of the light that is growing, the dawn that is coming, that brings light to the world. We still yearn in this season for the arrival of Jesus.

And today, I want to talk about the gift that is Christmas. I want to read this once more. TJ, read it. It’s not bad to read it again. It will get it into our hearts, our minds. Paul writes this in a letter. He writes to Christians much like us many thousands of years ago.

A couple thousand years ago in Galatia. And he says—Paul, he says—I am Paul, an apostle sent not from men, nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Jesus from the dead, and all the brothers and sisters with me, to the churches in Galatia. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever.

Amen.

Let me pray. Lord, I thank you once again for this morning, for Scripture, for this season where we celebrate your coming to us, your arrival, the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it. Lord, I pray that hope would grow in our hearts, faith would grow in our hearts, and that love would be the result.

In Jesus’ name, amen.

I want to start with a confession here. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to open my presents, right? And it was to the point where I couldn’t wait to know what I was getting. Did anyone do this—sneak around and try to find what your presents were before Christmas morning?

I still feel bad about this. When I was about five or six years old, my sister knew what I was getting from my parents, and I threatened her. If she did not tell me what I was getting for Christmas—and I had a match in my hand—this is intense—I was like, “I will light this match on you.” I did not say I would light her on fire, but in my five-year-old mind, I will light this match on you. And she freaked out, and she told me.

Another Christmas, I knew that my parents had just gone Christmas shopping, and the presents were in the trunk. So I snuck into the garage and I found out. I looked, and I found out what I was getting. Now, of course, I learned my lesson, because when it’s Christmas morning and you already know what you’re getting and you open it, it’s ruined, right? Because you feel guilty for how you obtained the information, and then the surprise is gone.

So that Christmas morning was overshadowed by guilt for how I got that information. But Christmas—part of the beauty of Christmas—is gift giving: giving gifts, receiving gifts, the anticipation of getting that gift.

I think that is what is most meaningful about Christmas, if we really stepped back. It’s not so much the gifts we receive from others, but it’s the gift of others that is most meaningful. It’s not what we receive from somebody; it’s the actual person and their relationship to us. We receive their presence. We receive their attention. We receive even their thoughtfulness.

Even the act of giving a gift is an act of relationship that says, “I’ve been thinking of you. I value you.” Maybe not in proportion to what I spent—hopefully a little more priceless—but I value you. I’m thinking of you. I give this to you. So really, the gift is not the gift that we get from others, but it is the gift of ourselves.

It’s the gift of relationship. I think of parents—good parents—and parents, at least for the first twenty years. And then it seems to continue. I thought it was going to be done after eighteen years, but even as I continue to be parented in different ways by my parents, they continue to give themselves to me. I think of the gift of parenting.

Parenting is the offering of your life to your children, isn’t it? I think about my mom. How many hours did she spend in the car, driving us around to the various events we had going? My parents going to practices, going to games, going to music lessons, paying for those things, paying for our food, paying for electricity and heat. Their whole life was an offering for our benefit.

And the sacrifice of putting aside often their agenda, their goals, were put on the shelf many times—especially my mom, I would say—for the sake of our growth and our goals. That’s a gift. That’s a gift of a person for a person.

I think of my dad, who worked security at a roller rink in between jobs, or got up at four o’clock in the morning making breakfast burritos so he could go out and try to sell them to different businesses so that he could feed us. This is the gift of themselves for us—an others-centered, self-sacrificial offering of one person for another.

And this is the gift of Christmas. It’s even more significant than a parent, another human being, for another human being. We are told here that it is the gift of God. The gift of Christmas is God—the gift of himself, the gift of God’s self—to us, an others-centered, you-centered gift for your benefit.

So the gift of Christmas is God giving God’s self to us in Jesus Christ. And we call this grace.

Grace.

Let me read this passage once more, starting in verse three: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory forever and ever.”

Amen.

I’ve had this song running in my head. It’s from Fernando Ortega. He takes verse three here and just slows it down for us, and it’s been running through my head. My daughter Juliet listens to Fernando Ortega every night before she goes to bed. She has for five or six years. And so often the song is going, and I’ll try to sing it to you.

If nothing else, it will get your attention. I’m not saying it will be pleasant, but it goes like this—and we’ll hear it in a little bit: “Grace and peace, grace and peace, grace and peace to you, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Isn’t that beautiful? It slows it down. Not that my voice was beautiful, but the words were beautiful.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

In this benediction, in this song, and in this intro to his letter—this greeting—we have all the components of gift-giving. We have a giver, we have a gift, and we have a receiver, a recipient. And it describes what Christmas is all about. It describes the gift of God to the world, to you, to me.

And it starts with grace. Grace in the Greek is charis. Charis. It literally means gift. In verse four, Paul tells us exactly what this gift is. The gift is not a thing. The gift is a person who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age. The gift—the grace—is God himself in Jesus Christ giving himself.

This is the will of God. I want to camp there. This is the will of God. The desire of God is to give you a gift—the gift of God’s self, his very life, his very presence, his attention. This is what God wants to do. God wants to give you the gift of himself, of relationship, so that you would be freed from all the agony and pain and disruption and chaos and dysfunction of this present evil age, of all the division.

John 3:16, right? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.” This is the desire of God. It says that God desires that no one perish. So the inclination of God is to give you a gift and to give himself to you—the self-giving love of God given to us.

This is Jesus from birth to death and everything in between, given for us. It is the death on the cross. It is the resurrection from the dead. It is the ascension to heaven. It is the promise of his return. It is the presence of his very life with us even now. Emmanuel—God with us.

This is grace. This is the gift.

Let me say it in a different way. God’s gift to you is God’s self in relationship to you. And this is the transformation and freedom that you desire. This is the joy that we speak of at Christmas. This is the freedom. This is the hope. The gift is wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. This is the gift of God.

And he’s poised from this moment, ready to give his life in the dirt, in the mud, in the mess of the human experience—a complete giving. God did not count equality with God a thing to be held onto, but gave himself up, taking the form of a servant, even to death on a cross.

He walks the dusty ground, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, even for those who are most vulnerable and least deserving of it. He brings healing. He brings release. He brings freedom from sickness, from dysfunction, from disease, from violence, from fear. This is the gift of God—grace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the gift is God’s self in Jesus Christ—grace. But Paul doesn’t just mention grace. He mentions peace. It’s two sides of the same coin. Grace describes the gift—the person of Jesus—and peace describes the effect that this relationship with the living God will have. Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

The effect of the gift.

One of our Christmas hymns says, “His law is love and his gospel is peace.” This is true. I have it tattooed on my arm in Cambodian—shalom. Peace. This is the gospel. If you open this gift, if you receive the gift of God in relationship to you, your creator, and you allow God to be in relationship with you and you walk with God, peace is the effect. Peace is the result.

The word in Greek is eirēnē. It draws from the Hebrew—shalom.

So let’s talk about this. I would say that this peace offered to us is in two spheres. Two main spheres. First, this peace is a promise for peace inside of us. And second, it’s peace between us. It’s within us and between us.

Let’s start with peace within us. Paul writes to the church in Philippi—people like us, struggling with anxiety and worry. He says, “Do not be anxious about anything—anything. But in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” This describes a relationship with a living God. This is the grace: that you can actually talk to God, and God responds.

And what’s the result of this relationship? “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” That’s the promise.

I think we live in one of the most anxious times in history. Maybe not, but it feels pretty anxious right now, doesn’t it? It feels full of anxiety and worry. I feel it. I think it’s probably this combination that we’re globally connected more than we ever have been, in terms of awareness of all that is going wrong and all that could go wrong. One piece falls on the other side of the ocean and it’s a domino effect.

We’re all connected like no other time in history. There have been civilizations that have fallen and kind of gone off the map in previous centuries. But now, if one major civilization falls, we’re connected to that civilization globally. So it’s not an isolated event anymore. That causes anxiety.

Pair that with the 24-hour news cycle that thrives on your fear and your outrage and your anxiety. The more anxious you are, the more you’ll scroll, and the more it has your attention.

Add to that COVID and all of that. Research is being done. Children are more anxious and depressed and have more mental health problems than ever before because of COVID—the season of isolation, the global pandemic, and all the ways we responded to it or didn’t respond to it, and all the outrage it created in families and in all of us.

I’ve noticed in myself that after COVID, when I fly—this has never happened before—but I get anxious in a tube thirty thousand feet in the air. I’m like, “I can’t get off this thing.” I have little panic attacks, and I listen to Fernando Ortega—“Grace and peace”—and I breathe deeply.

The other night, we went to Santa Fe, to Saint Francis Cathedral, to hear the Santa Fe choral group—professional choral singers. The place was packed. We were right in the middle of four hundred people, and this thing is ancient. There are no fire exits. And I had a ten-second panic attack. I’m like, “Wait a minute. I’m stuck here.”

I don’t know if you feel that. I don’t know if you get anxiety. I don’t know if you feel that pit in your stomach. I don’t know if you have physical manifestations of the worry you carry for yourself, for others, for the world. I don’t know if you find yourself lying awake at night thinking about all that concerns you and those that you love.

We’re an anxious people.

The gift of God’s life to you—the grace of God, God’s very self given in Jesus—is peace inside. It’s the opportunity to have peace inside, to know that there’s a peace that passes understanding that will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus. It’s a peace that doesn’t make sense. It’s peace in a world of chaos. This is the kind of peace that God offers.

But then there’s peace not just within us, but between us.

And this is what I love, and this is why the gospel is peace. It’s not just a personal experience. It’s us in the world. We know we need the good news that there is a possibility of peace between people—peace between us.

Peace in our marriages, peace with our children, peace between families. The bigger my family grows, the less peace we have. There are wars. We add in-laws—those silly in-laws, right? The more stressful the Thanksgiving meal becomes, the more dysfunction seems to erupt, the more opportunity for little gossip inside conversations.

And we’re in a relatively healthy family, but it’s not always peaceful. We need peace between us. And then, of course, we see the global horrors and dysfunction and violence and strife and racism and prejudice and authoritarianism and all of this stuff. We need shalom. We need peace between people, between us and God.

I’ve said this, and you’ll keep hearing it, because this is my little shtick. Shalom—peace, wellness, wholeness in all directions. Three directions: between humanity and God, between humanity and humanity—one another—and between humanity and creation: the earth, the environment, the cosmos.

God created the world to be one of shalom—perfect peace, relational wholeness with God, relational wholeness with other people, and relational peace with all creation: animals, plants, the soil, the dirt.

And so this is the hope of Christmas. This is the result—not only inner peace, personal peace—but peace in all directions. It reverses the trajectory of history, which has tended toward chaos and violence and division and war, and it brings us toward wholeness. It undoes the damage of sin and destruction.

Truly, right? Here’s another Christmas hymn: “Truly he has taught us to love one another.” This is what Jesus offers—to forgive one another, to be restored to one another, to be reconciled to one another.

So, grace and peace. The gift is God given in relationship to you. The effect of being in relationship with God is peace inside and between us. Emmanuel—God with us.

And so we end here. We end here with three titles: “Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul ends this blessing, this statement, with titles of Jesus. And I think these titles not only further describe the gift of God’s self, but they also give us instructions on how to open the gift, how to unwrap the gift.

Each of these titles shows us how we receive the gift, how we enter into relationship with the gift. It’s the operations manual, the instructions manual. How do I use this? How do I play with it? How do I interact with it? How do I enter into relationship with it? Lord Jesus Christ—each one matters.

Let’s start with the middle: Jesus. Jesus. In the Greek, Yeshua—Yeshua. This is simply Joshua.

This refers to the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, the Israel story of Joshua, who would lead Israel against their enemies. It literally means “one who saves.” When the angel comes to Mary and announces that she will become pregnant with the Savior of the world, “You will name him Yeshua, Jesus, because he will save the world from their sins.”

He gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age. So there is only one Savior powerful enough to rescue us from our strongest enemies.

What are our strongest enemies? Satan, sin, and death. Satan, sin, and death.

And when Jesus comes, he comes as a child, lives life, dies on a cross, rises from the dead. He defeats Satan, sin, and death. They no longer have their hold on us. He is our Savior.

So to unwrap the gift of Christmas, to enter into relationship with God that he offers us, we acknowledge our need for a Savior. We have to acknowledge that we can’t save ourselves—that we can’t be smart enough, that we can’t be good enough, that we can’t be fast enough. We can’t outrun the effects of sin and destruction and dysfunction in our life.

We have to acknowledge that we need a Savior, and that Jesus is that Savior. He is the Savior we desperately long for, the one who saves us from our entanglement in sin.

And I say this a lot, because I think it’s important. Sin is not only the personal things that we have done to offend God. It doesn’t stop there. Sin is our contribution to breaking relationship in all three of those directions we described—shalom.

It’s our disruption and damaging of the relationship between us and God, yes, but also between us and other people, and between us and creation.

And that has created an entanglement, a wicked web, that has bound us and all the world. So we own that we have contributed to the suffering in the world, that we have caused some of this.

But also, the hope of the gospel is this: what Jesus saves us from is not only the sins we’ve committed, but the sins committed against us as well. The damage that has been done by those who should have been there for us, those who should have been faithful to us; the ways people have sinned against us; the systems that should have provided for us; all of the evil in the world and its effects; the trauma it has caused.

Wounded people wound people.

It’s healing for the sins committed against us. It’s freedom from the things that have been done to us that cause us so much pain and so many problems. So Jesus is the Savior given to us for our sins, to save us from the present evil age—from the entanglement of the sins we have committed and the sins committed against us.

So we need that. We need to be freed from that. This is Jesus, the Savior. This is the gift.

And then we go on to the next one: Christ.

Christ. All of you know Christ is not Jesus’ last name, right? It’s not Jesus Christ like a signature. Christ is a title. Christ means Messiah.

And the Messiah is this person that God had promised would come to save the world, to undo the sin of Adam and Eve and all of this entanglement. In Genesis 3:15—they call it the proto-evangelion, the gospel before the gospel—this is when God finds Adam and Eve in the garden. He speaks to the serpent and says that the serpent will bruise the heel of this Messiah, but he will crush the head of the serpent.

This is referring to Jesus, the one to come. And this is the aching, longing hope of Israel for thousands and thousands of years. This is what the prophets proclaimed to Israel: there is one to come who is greater than Moses, greater than your prophets, greater than Elijah.

Isaiah prophesied that all would be renewed, all would be restored, and it would happen through this child born to a virgin. The prophets proclaim and prophesy this promise—that the hopes of the world lie in the Christ, in the Messiah.

So to open the gift of Christmas, to enter into relationship with God who brings peace, is to acknowledge that Jesus is this Christ, that he is the Messiah, that he fulfills the history, the story, and the aching of Israel—the longed-for Messiah.

Jesus is the Christ.

And then last: Lord.

Paul writes in Romans 10:9, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” If you declare with your mouth that Jesus is Lord—what does that mean?

To receive the gift of Christmas is to receive the life of God offered to us, for us. And that means acknowledging that Jesus is Lord—that he is the most important relationship in your life.

To proclaim “Jesus is Lord” is to pledge our allegiance to Jesus. To pledge allegiance to Jesus as our most supreme allegiance—over nation, over flag, over marriage, over any other agreement or promise you make—you pledge allegiance to Jesus. He is Lord.

It means naming Jesus as the one to whom your life belongs—your most important relationship. It means trusting his way of love above all other ways to achieve what you want. To pledge allegiance to Jesus is to pledge allegiance to his way of love and life—above violence, above self-interest, above nationalism, above materialism, above consumerism, above your savings account, above the rat race, above whatever it is.

We pledge allegiance to Jesus.

And it’s a relational thing. It’s not like pledging allegiance to a list of rules. It’s saying, “I am entering into a whole-life relationship, and I’m walking this way of love—loving God and loving others—walking this way of peace, of shalom.”

I have been given inner peace, and I want to walk in peace. I will be a peacemaker, and I will be called a child of God. I enter into this path, this way of love, and I follow Jesus. I learn from Jesus the way of love in each and every circumstance.

So this is the gift of Christmas.

It comes from God our Father, who loves you deeply. It’s his desire. He’s excited. He’s excited to give you this gift.

The gift is relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ—the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the Savior of the world and of you.

And so the question is: will you receive this gift? Will you receive it? Will you bow to this Jesus? Will you follow this way? Will you receive what this relationship brings?

Peace inside. Peace between God, others, and creation.

So grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lord Jesus, thank you, my friend. Your gift—your offering of yourself—is the most meaningful, most sacred, and most needed gift we have as human beings, and it is given freely.

Thank you. Thank you for the gift that we celebrate this Christmas. Thank you for the gift that is continually offered to us. Thank you for the opportunity, daily, even moment by moment, to open it—to profess that you are Jesus, you are Lord, you are Christ.

Help us to follow you, and to open and receive this gift.

In Jesus’ name, amen.

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