Once again, the ‘world’ is celebrating ‘Christmas’ or rather ‘X-mas – we hear carols on the radio, TV, shopping centres; we see decorations in various places. We hear people wishing one another ‘Happy Holidays’, ‘Best wishes for the Season’, and the appearance of the ‘Santa Claus’. What is obviously absent is the mention of the Lord Jesus Christ and what Christmas really means to Christians. Of course, Christmas day is not really the actual date of the birth of Christ; and the day and celebration has its,probable source from a pagan celebration – however the observance of Christmas is a good time and opportunity to share the revelation of the Divine Saviour – JESUS CHRIST.

The Gospel of Luke opens with declarations of Jesus’ identity and mission and closes with Jesus’ own summary of His ongoing work. The book of Acts (also written by Luke) opens with Jesus’ commissioning His disciples to witness to the end of the earth and closes with apostle Paul in Rome taking the news of salvation to all peoples in the then known world, including the Gentiles.

Luke presents Jesus as the divine Saviour who has come to offer salvation to all people from every nation. At the heart of this salvation is the forgiveness of sin for the individual believer, as Jesus the Lord is received by faith – repentance and the forgiveness of sin for the individual believer is at the heart of the definition of the gospel and salvation – the believer is saved by grace through faith in Christ. The nature of this salvation is not only for now; it is also the ultimate and final salvation from all the effects of the Fall (which resulted in the fallen world with its sin, disease, decay, death for all the ‘descendants’ of Adam).
If you observe Christmas as a believer, you are celebrating the wonderful salvation God has given to you in Christ, together with all believers from the Old Testament and the New Testament (who together form the ‘Church’).
However, if you just celebrate the ‘Christmas’ spirit’ as being part of those experiencing the wonderful feelings of the season (as some call it), you are missing the whole meaning of why Jesus came and what it means to the people of the fallen world.

Luke’s reference to the Old Testament does more than point to the fulfilment of prophecy of God’s long-promised redemption plan; he made it plain that it was necessary that the Christ should suffer to accomplish this redemption plan and His arrival is not unexpected; Christ’s arrival has been spoken by God Himself and through His prophets, over thousands of years, The Old Testament Scriptures are the interpretative grid by which the life and work of Jesus are to be understood. The New Testament cannot be understood without the Old Testament and the Old Testament is incomplete without the New Testament.

When Jesus came, He did not teach the fundamental goodness of human nature. He affirmed the Old Testament truth that humankind, male and female,were made in the image of God, bue He also believed that this image had been marred. He taught the worth of human beings, not least by devoting Himself to their service, but He also taught our unworthiness. He did not deny that we can give ‘good things’ to others, but He added that even while doing good we do not escape the designation ‘evil’ – in fact, He made important assertions about the extent, nature, origin and effect of evil in human beings.
He taught the universal extent of human evil; in fact, the most upright people are the most keenly aware of their own degradation.
He taught the self-centred nature of human evil. What is common to all is the assertion of the self either against our neighbour (murder, adulter, theft, false witness and covetousness – beaches of the second half of the Ten Commandments – or assertion of self against God (;pride; and ‘folly’ being well defined in the Old Testament as denials of God’s sovereignty and even of His existence). Jesus summarised the Ten Commandments in terms of love for God and neighbour, and every sinb is a form of selfish revolt against God’s authority or our neighbour’s welfare.
Jesus taught the inward origin of human evil. Its source has to be traced neither to a bad environment nor to a faulty education (although these can have a powerful conditioning influence on impressionable young people),but rather to our ‘heart, our inherited and twisted nature.
Jesus spoke of the defiling effect of human evil. All these evils come from ‘inside’, and make a human being ‘unclean’.

We shall see how God’s salvation plan in Jesus deals with evil and the ‘heart’ subsequently.

CHRISTMAS – THE REVELATION OF THE DIVINE SAVIOUR (B)
The biblical view of the ‘heart’ is that it is nothing less than the taproot of the self, the source of our character and purposes, of our attitudes and responses, of our self-image and self-projection, in short, of the total human being that each of us is. The Bible also reveals that God looks at us from this perspective, and what we are in God’s eye view of us, good or bad, is according to our heart quality.
Jesus Himself said, “What comes out from the mouth proceeds from the heart” (Matt. 15:18). A bad-hearted individual is like a bad tree producing bad fruit (Luke 12:33-35). People tend to assess others from the outside or outward appearance, and then grade them accordingly by their skills, etc, seen outwardly; God, however, assesses everyone from the inside out, measuring us entirely by the state of our hearts. As far as God is concerned, the heart quality of individuals means everything.

God’s plan of salvation focuses on the transformation of our hearts and our lives, to make us more and more like Christ, so that we can be God’s people and ‘children’, and the Triune God can be our God. Jesus came to inaugurate a new age, to ‘recreate’ a new humanity with Christ as the Head. In that sense, Christ is the last Adam of the Adamic age, and the second Adam in heading the creation of a single new humanity in place of the old fallen humanity in the first Adam; and this creation of the ‘new man’ and the new society is God’s creative work which is beyond the capacity of human power and ingenuity. In His grace, mercy and love, the triune God decides to implement the plan of salvation; the Father purposed not to allow the fallen human race to perish and He sent His Son to effect the redemption, and Jesus died as our substitute, taking on the penalty of sin, propitiating the wrath of God against sin, and rose again in His resurrection, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, completing His mission of redemption. The Holy Spirit effects regeneration and transformation in the lives of those who repented and believed, and He embarks on the transformation and restoration of the believers so that they can be a new holy humanity, fit to dwell with God in the new heaven and new earth, as His adopted children, in eternal bliss, joy and peace, with their resurrected new bodies (at the second advent), and glorious inheritance in Christ.

Because evil is so deeply entrenched within us, self-salvation is impossible.So our most urgent need is redemption, that is to say, a new beginning in life which offers us both a cleansing from the pollution of sin and a new heart, even a new creation, with new perspectives, new ambitions and new powers. Jesus came to effect this redemption; He not only died, but He died for our sins. The sins were ours, but the death was his. He died our death; He bore our penalty. Only then could we be saved.

The Holy Spirit is the One who effects the ‘new birth’ (being born again of the Spirit) i.e. regeneration. The new birth is a work of God; regeneration is not self-generated – it is not a moral reformation, although it leads to one. The Holy Spirit indwells the Christian, and He continues to transform and mould the believer from within into the likeness of Christ, working inwardly, from inside out and focusing on the ‘heart’, and renewing it to be what God intends it to be ultimately.
Regeneration initiates the beginning of a new spiritual life, implanted in us by the Holy Spirit, enabling us to repent and believe as the first manifestation of the implanted new life, as the restoration of the entire creation to its final perfection. Regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit who initially brings persons into a living union with Christ, changing their hearts, so that they who were spiritually dead become spiritually alive, now able and willing to repent of sin, believe the gospel and serve the Lord.

This, in essence, is the true meaning of ‘Christmas’. It is the most important event in human history – God becomes man so that man may become like God, as originally intended. The supreme expression of God’s goodness is the amazing grace and inexpressible love that show kindness by saving sinners who deserve only condemnation: saving them at the tremendous cost of Christ’s death on the cross at Calvary.