The Christmas season is a cause for joy and celebration for many, but it can almost simultaneously be a reason to get stressed and anxious as well. With all the holiday traffic, get-together preparations, expenses on gifts and parties, and so on, Christmas might sometimes cause us to worry instead of be happy.
Christmas has got to be my favourite holiday, but I have to admit that most points between the start of December until the end of it, I can put too much emphasis on all the necessary preparations for that one day. My mind becomes too preoccupied with all the gifts, sales, grocery shopping, decoration set-up, parties, dinners and everything that come along with Christmas celebrations.
But behind the parties, gifts, celebrations, shopping sales and reunions, we must remember the deeper message of Christmas and what it offers to us: freedom.
Hundreds of years before the first Christmas (although Christmas might not have happened in December even though the message is still the same), a prophet by the name of Isaiah foresaw the celebration that it would bring to all the world: "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6)
The greatest message of Christmas is Christ and what He has to offer, not what we have to offer to others or what other people have to offer to us. The greatest gift on Christmas day is not something that we are yet to receive when the sun comes up on Christmas Day, but one that was given to us two millennia ago in the form of a baby boy who came humbly into this world and who would later become our Redeemer.
Christmas is a time to remember that we are free from sin and death and a time to declare the arrival of our Savior who once and for all made a way for us to come to the Father freely through Him.
The world would like you to believe that what makes Christmas Christmas is all about the celebrations, possessions, or sometimes even about the people that we spend them with. Not that there's anything wrong with all of these. But without Christ in the middle of all of that, Christmas will be nothing more than an expensive way to end the year.
That's why Christmas might cause stress and anxiety at times—because we focus too much on what has to be done instead on what has already been done. Central to the message of Christmas is no less than the gospel: the good news that Jesus was born to be raised, crucified and resurrected so that in Him we may have peace on earth not just in this age but even in the age to come.
