The days before Christmas can be a tiring season of preparation, planning, shopping, and wrapping. But I think as we prepare for the Christmas celebrations, dinners, travel, and gift giving, it’s equally important that we pause and prepare our souls for Christmas.

During this time of year, it may be easy to forget that the bigger purpose behind Bethlehem was Calvary. But the purpose of the manger was realized in the horrors of the cross. The purpose of his birth was his death.

Or to put it more personally: Christmas is necessary because I am a sinner. The incarnation reminds us of our desperate condition before a holy God.

Several years ago WORLD Magazine published a column by William H. Smith with the provocative title, “Christmas is disturbing: Any real understanding of the Christmas messages will disturb anyone” (Dec. 26, 1992).

In part, Smith wrote:

Many people who otherwise ignore God and the church have some religious feeling, or feel they ought to, at this time of the year. So they make their way to a church service or Christmas program. And when they go, they come away feeling vaguely warmed or at least better for having gone, but not disturbed.

Why aren’t people disturbed by Christmas? One reason is our tendency to sanitize the birth narratives. We romanticize the story of Mary and Joseph rather than deal with the painful dilemma they faced when the Lord chose Mary to be the virgin who would conceive her child by the power of the Holy Spirit. We beautify the birth scene, not coming to terms with the stench of the stable, the poverty of the parents, the hostility of Herod. Don’t miss my point. There is something truly comforting and warming about the Christmas story, but it comes from understanding the reality, not from denying it.

Most of us also have not come to terms with the baby in the manger. We sing, “Glory to the newborn King.” But do we truly recognize that the baby lying in the manger is appointed by God to be the King, to be either the Savior or Judge of all people? He is a most threatening person.

Malachi foresaw his coming and said, “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap.” As long as we can keep him in the manger, and feel the sentimental feelings we have for babies, Jesus doesn’t disturb us. But once we understand that his coming means for every one of us either salvation or condemnation, he disturbs us deeply.

What should be just as disturbing is the awful work Christ had to do to accomplish the salvation of his people. Yet his very name, Jesus, testifies to us of that work.

That baby was born so that “he who had no sin” would become “sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” The baby’s destiny from the moment of his conception was hell—hell in the place of sinners. When I look into the manger, I come away shaken as I realize again that he was born to pay the unbearable penalty for my sins.

That’s the message of Christmas: God reconciled the world to himself through Christ, man’s sin has alienated him from God, and man’s reconciliation with God is possible only through faith in Christ…Christmas is disturbing.

Don’t get me wrong—Christmas should be a wonderful celebration. Properly understood, the message of Christmas confronts before it comforts, it disturbs before it delights.

The purpose of Christ’s birth was to live a sinless life, suffer as our substitute on the cross, satisfy the wrath of God, defeat death, and secure our forgiveness and salvation.

Christmas is about God the Father (the offended party) taking the initiative to send his only begotten son to offer his life as the atoning sacrifice for our sins, so that we might be forgiven for our many sins.

As Smith so fitly concludes his column:

Only those who have been profoundly disturbed to the point of deep repentance are able to receive the tidings of comfort, peace, and joy that Christmas proclaims.

Amen and Merry Christmas!

 

(The final selection from C.J.’s interview with pastor and author Dr. Sinclair Ferguson)

C.J. Mahaney: Let me move on to the fourth and final quote. This is my most recent favorite quote, because one of the great things about having access to your quotes is not only the difference they make in my private life, in my understanding of pastoral ministry and preaching, but also the difference they make in individual sermons. So if I really don’t have much else to say—and often I don’t—the “go to” quotes make all the difference.

So this particular quote is for pastors, although any and all readers will benefit from the content of this quote. You write,

Only by seeing our sin do we come to see the need for and wonder of grace. But exposing sin is not the same thing as unveiling and applying grace. We must be familiar with and exponents of its multifaceted power, and know how to apply it to a variety of spiritual conditions. Truth to tell, exposing sin is easier than applying grace; for, alas, we are more intimate with the former than we sometimes are with the latter. Therein lies our weakness.

This line is just filled with discernment for pastors and filled with discernment for everyone.

So without in any way minimizing the doctrine of sin—because you opened by saying it’s only by seeing our sin we come to see the need and the wonder of grace—how can we effectively expose sin and yet ultimately unveil and apply grace?

Sinclair Ferguson: At least for myself it’s returning to a principle with me: Make sure you have gone back to basics. Make sure that you think back from first principles.

Part of the first principles of the gospel are these categories, sin and grace. I think the thing that I am trying to get at here is the correlation between my ability to grasp the grace, grace of grace and my grasping the sin, sin of sin (what Ralph Venning calls the “exceeding sinfulness of sin”). The sin is mine and therefore natural for me to see. It’s grace that isn’t natural to me and therefore difficult to see. Therefore I am going to struggle to bring the sin I am so familiar with to the grace I am unfamiliar with. And therefore I need to find ways given to me in Scripture of discovering the graciousness of God.

And I find a couple of paradoxes here. On the one hand, it’s almost easier for me to explore the vocabulary for sin in the Bible than the vocabulary for grace. And I notice this in the literature, too. As a preacher it is wonderful to be able to say to people, “Sin is a multi-headed monster. One of the richest areas of vocabulary in the Hebrew language is for sin. There is transgression, there is iniquity...” And in the addressing the substitutionary atonement of Christ, it would be right for me to speak about that.

But on the other hand I find that, because I am a sinner, I have got to work harder intellectually and mentally to see there is an even richer vocabulary for grace. Under the principle of Romans 5:20—“where sin abounds, grace super-abounds”—has got to be a principle on which I will live my Christian life. I’m reminded of the hymn,

O Jesus! full of pardoning grace,—
More full of grace than I of sin.

And if somebody quibbles by saying surely the work of Christ is equivalent grace to sin, I think, “No. Paul is saying there really is more grace in Christ than sin in me.”

Here is an illustration. Because American houses are bigger, we have a washing machine and a tumble dryer in the house. Because houses tend to be smaller in the United Kingdom, many families have a washing machine and spin dryer all in one machine. It takes longer because the thing goes through the washing cycle and then it goes through the spin-drying cycle.

I often think, “That’s my life as a Christian. I am in the machinery of the exposure of my sin. Then I get thrown around to discover grace. But the thing about grace is that grace is Christ, it’s not substance. It’s not washing powder that’s thrown in.

Grace is Christ. When I am in Christ I am going to become more conscious of my other sins and the same sins at deeper levels. I realize what I thought was the sin was actually only the manifestation of the real sin.

I am constantly being turned in this sin/grace, sin/grace, sin/grace cycle all my days.

I still hold the, kind of the classical Augustinian view of Romans 7:14–25 that Paul is actually speaking about himself. I don’t think he is speaking wholesale about himself; I think he is speaking about himself from a particular perspective. But I think Paul understood this sin/grace cycle. And it’s not like now it’s grace, now it’s sin, but it’s both at the same time. It’s in this that you realize why looking at yourself in a certain light, this tension is expressed in a deep-seated contradiction of being—is bound to make you cry out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24).

But that is exactly the point where, as Christians, we need to learn that we are in Christ, but we are not yet in heaven. The dominion of sin has been broken, but the presence of sin has not been abolished.

And I think it is R.L. Dabney who says that surely there is no more extraordinary contradiction in the universe than that sin continues to dwell where Christ indwells. Or, sometimes I put it this way: Once you have got a lodger in your house he may be extremely difficult to dislocate from the house. And sin is like that. Sin used to be the owner of the house. Sin is now a lodger in the house, but lodgers can be very, very difficult to get out.

By God’s grace, the great thing has been done and sin’s dominion has been broken. But we are, in an ongoing way, discovering how sin is not a commodity that can be abstracted. It is in our bones. And it is battle all the way to the end.…

CJM: You have been exceedingly generous with your time, Dr. Ferguson. And actually, we must get you to lunch. But before we conclude: You have made different references to preachers and others who have had this profound effect on you. I want you to know you have had that same profound effect on me. And if anyone is perceptive when I am preaching, they will hear your influence in and through my preaching. And so one of the highlights for me has been just to sit here and not only learn from you, but now be able to say, “Thank you.”

Thank you for example, your teaching, your writing, your preaching. It has made, not a minor difference, and not even a significant difference. I would say it has made a profound difference, and for that I am profoundly grateful to God.

Thank you, Sinclair.

SF: Thank you, C.J.

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The above quote from Dr. Ferguson was published on the Reformation21 blog here.

Photo © 2008, Lukas VanDyke