Don’t Count Sins this Christmas

We dedicated seven beautiful children a few months ago. We brought them before God and his church. We pledged an abiding interest in and commitment to their spiritual welfare. We did so fully understanding that these babies will one day choose to do what is wrong in the eyes of God. They will sin. It is inevitable. They have a nature that is bent away from God and toward sin. This is not to say that they are ONLY prone to sin. No, they are also amazing miracles of God’s creative imagination and unending grace. They are part of the creation judged to be “very good” by the Creator God (Genesis 1:31). And they are born with a longing to know the One who has made them and to do what is right. But they will need to be rescued. The spiritual flaw which plagues them from birth—and plagues us all—is not something we can fix on our own. Despite all the instruction that we receive and all the guidelines given by parents and society, all of us err. We lack sound judgment. We do things we regret, that we know are unwise. And we do them knowing that they are unwise and harmful to ourselves and to others. Christmas is the story of how the Creator God chose to address this relentless moral and spiritual failure of humans. He acted to rescue us from our sins. God has not missed his opportune moment on Planet Earth. God actually arrived at precisely the moment he chose. This is the meaning of Christmas. It was just the right moment in the spiritual condition of humans. We were powerless. After a thousand years of trying to keep the law, it was obvious that we were not going to be able to do it. The failure of the law to bring righteousness was clearly evident to all objective observers. Some would insist that it was man’s move, that God had done all he could possibly be expected to do. He created humans. He gave them stewardship of a lush and beautiful planet. He gave them relationships and communication skills. He gave humans amazing intellectual capacities. He equipped them for social networking that would enable them to achieve their greatest potential and highest good. Humans messed up the creation of God, including and especially themselves. All sin. That is who we are and how we are. Despite our flaws, we have the moral sense to identify evil. And we are incensed at injustice and wanton death and destruction. As it turns out, the greatest barrier to faith in God is often the question of evil in the world. We cannot reconcile in our minds the state of death and disease in the world with a loving and engaged God. God acted at this very point, experiential and philosophical. He struck at the heart of ungodliness. This is what Christmas is about, God dealing with evil in the world. The ungodly are the undevout and ungrateful of the world. They display qualities that a loving God abhors and practice things which he disdains while lacking virtues which he exemplifies and commands. Christmas is the season for the skeptic and the cynic to take note. All unbelievers should contemplate for a moment the notion that God became man in order to address the fatal flaw of humanity both personal and universal, individual and comprehensive. We are sinners. The manner of God’s movement against evil is surprising--not the violent, military annihilation of evil that leaves us all as casualties and all of us wondering why no other solution was possible. God addressed violence, disobedience, sin and evil by allowing these things, working through humans, to kill his only Son. Two words stand out in the story of Jesus: love and death. God responded to the evil of the world with unconditional love. God loved us all to the dying point. It was terrible this murder of the righteous one. But it was also planned in the foreknowledge and predetermined counsel of God. “Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). God knew that not one of us would ever be who we were created to be. Therefore, God’s one and only Son was born of a virgin on Christmas day. God became a man. He became a good man, good in the most authentic sense. He became a PERFECT man, a man as men were meant to be from their creation as designed by their Creator. This man was the Second ADAM, as Paul describes him: For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:17). Only this kind of man could take away our sin, God’s lamb without blemish, sacrificed on our behalf for the sins of the world. Christ reconciled us with God by eliminating the conflict. We were enemies of God. Christ identified all the places where we were wrong, sinful in our behavior. He addressed those through his blood. He made us clean and right through his death upon the cross for us. The ministry of reconciliation has been committed to us by God: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). God was “not counting men’s sins against them.” That would be a great Christmas attitude for all the upcoming family gatherings. In the light of God’s great gift of grace, how can we do less? Oh, if we could practice and pass on the reconciliation that God has given us and NOT COUNT sins this Christmas.