Peace. That’s what the angels announced that first Christmas when they visited the shepherds. Although considering how often angels in the Bible told people not to be afraid, the shepherds probably felt anything but peace at the unexpected arrival of a host of supernatural beings!
If I’m honest, sometimes I feel anything but peace, too. I feel stress when ministry responsibilities pile up, and I grieve over friends who are hurting and even over acts of violence I hear about in the news. But I can experience peace in the midst of those normal (and valid) human emotions when I take the time to slow down and focus on Jesus.
J. I. Packer’s Knowing God is one of the few Christian teaching books that I’ve read more than once. It had a profound influence on my Christian growth, and my view of the significance of Christmas was deepened by reading Packer’s thoughts on the incarnation (God the Son taking on a human nature):
It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. “The Word was made flesh” (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the incarnation.…if Jesus was the same person as the eternal Word, the Father’s agent in creation “through whom also he made the worlds” (Heb 1:2, RV), it is no wonder if fresh acts of creative power marked His coming into this world, and His life in it, and His exit from it. … The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.
May you experience peace this Christmas as you ponder the wonderful mystery of God becoming man in the person of Jesus!
