REV. LYNN’S BLOG

Here in Australia it is Christmas morning. Although the temperature on Wednesday soared to 39 Celsius, this morning is pleasantly cool and the predicted top is in the low twenties. The tree is up, and surrounded with presents for family and friends. The food for today’s lunch is all prepared. All that remains is to decorate the table. Friends will come and eat with me for lunch, then I will go and join them for dinner, an arrangement we have had for the past 4 years. A quiet day, nothing big or exciting. In the new year I will travel to Queensland, along the way catching up with my son and his family in Wollongong, and then when I get to Queensland with my other son and his family up there, as well as a few other special friends.

Last night I watched on television the second of the major Christmas carols productions for the year, the Carols by Candelight from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne. Last Sunday I had watched the carols from the Domain in Sydney. Maybe it’s just me, but it seemed that this year both leaned a little more strongly toward the true spiritual meaning of Christmas than they have for quite a few years now. It was wonderful to hear the true Gospel story proclaimed in song - in some cases, at least, by people who obviously actually believed it - to a huge audience throughout Australia. Maybe, just maybe, this long, hard year has had a positive effect… maybe, just maybe, it has caused people to begin to look for spiritual truth.

I know there are Christians who don’t celebrate Christmas, including some of my dear personal friends. They say it is just a pagan celebration (yet we say “Jesus is the reason for the Season.”) They say that Jeremiah 10 says Christmas trees are an abomination (even though Jeremiah was writing to his own generation, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and was simply talking about the making of wooden idols.) They say Jesus wasn’t born on 25th December (no, He wasn’t - but then, neither was the Queen born on the day we celebrate as her birthday.)

They can say what they like. For me, the opportunity to publicly declare “Joy to the world, the Lord has come! Let earth receive her King!” overrides all the arguments. Read the words of some of the wonderful old carols like “We Three Kings” - they are the Gospel in a nutshell, designed to teach people who didn’t have the benefits of a readily accessible Bible. If, amid the trees and tinsel, the presents and materialism, the food and grog, people who would never normally open a Bible are willing to open their hearts even a little to the message that God the Son left the glories of heaven to be born into a sinful world, so that He could grow to manhood and die for the sins of mankind - then long live Christmas!

I pray that for you and yours, Christmas 2009 will be a blessed, peaceful and safe celebration.

This blog is © copyright Lynn Fowler.

There is one God, and one mediator between God and people, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:51 Timothy 2:5
English: World English Bible - WEB
5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,