Tag: Christmas

Did God Really Become a Baby?

Posted on December 5, 2013

Advent season offers a unique opportunity to reflect on one of the most fascinating claims about Jesus–his incarnation. Depending on your vantage point, the incarnation may sound like a fantastic fairy tale, a mind-blowing reality, a comforting truth, or uninteresting doctrine. I find it both outlandish and profound.

God becoming a baby? Really? How absurd. What would compel God to do that? How is it possible? And if he did come, why not come as an adult and skip the awkward baby stage? Many non-Christians find this claim absurd, while many non-Christians take it for granted, which is why I’m taking four Sundays to consider the incarnation from a skeptical and theological perspective. Here’s an introductory video:

Advent 2013 – The Coming of God from City Life Church on Vimeo.

Sermons and manuscripts can be found here.

4 Reasons to Not Celebrate Christmas (by C.S. Lewis)

Posted on December 10, 2011

Ahh, Christmas the most wonderful stressful time of the year! C. S. Lewis had a hard time with Christmas too. In fact, in several essays he denounces the contemporary celebration of Christmas. In “What Christmas Means to Me” he lists four reasons he condemns commercial Christmas.

  1. It gives on the whole much more pain the pleasure…Long before December 25th everyone is worn out…They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.
  2. It is predicated on involuntary gift-giving. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost blackmail. Consider the despair and resentment when an unexpected person gives you a gift at the last minute!
  3. The waste of money and human skill in buying gaudy and useless gadgets. Have we really no better use for material and of human skill and time that to spend them on all this rubbish?
  4. The nuisance of it all. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country…in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as charity.

Watts' Joy to the World

Posted on December 24, 2009

The famous Christmas hymn, Joy to the World, didn’t start out as a Christmas song. The hymn was written by Isaac Watts, a famous 18th century preacher turned hymn writer. With his health in steep decline, he turned from the pulpit to the pen, composing around 750 hymns.

Christ-centered Hymnody

Watts diverged from the traditional church practice of strictly adapting Scripture to song, by adding his own lyrical reflections to Scripture inspired hymns. Mike Cosper notes: “Isaac Watts recognized that people needed to see the gospel in the psalms and hymns of the church, and they needed to sing them in language and metaphors that they understood. In this, he became not only the father of the modern hymn, but the pace-setter for contextualizing the gospel for the people of God.” Joy to the World was included in Watts’ 1719 hymnal, Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.

Origins of “Joy to the World”

Joy to the World was a poetic reflection on Psalm 98. Reflecting on this psalm, Watts bridged Davidic joy in the Lord to its prophetic fulfillment in Christ (the Lord). The original title of the song was “The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom.” His aim was “to show David as a Christian” by revealing the Christ-centered character of Davidic psalms.

Joy in the Story of Scripture

Using the larger Story of Scripture as an interpretive guide, Watts locates “the joy of the world” among the various chapters Creation, Fall, Redemption, and New Creation (Genesis to Revelation). He weaves a redemptive thread that begins on the fateful day of Adam’s fall and finishes at the future return of the Christ:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found

In his first coming—Christmas—the Second Adam relaxes the curse by redeeming human hearts. In his second coming, all of heaven and nature will joy the song of redemption. The joy of salvation is for both creature and creation:

Joy to the World , the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,

Every person and nation will be called to account for their response to the “good news of great joy”. God is gracious but he is also just. Those that respond to his grace will be spared his judgment and enter into an everlasting joy to the world that forever glories in his righteousness.

He rules the world with truth and grace,

And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,

May our hearts receive Jesus as King with fresh joy and exultation this Season, as we join the refrain of all creation singing: “Joy to the World, the Lord is come!”

Check out the music of Sojourn in the Isaac Watts Project.