Why Christmas? (John 3.16)

I remember one of the first times I ever had a truly serious conversation with someone about God. I’d grown up in church, so I knew all the stories, and I knew a decent amount about what Christians are supposed to believe. But I wasn’t really interested.

But I had a friend named Jeremy who was a Christian, and who came at the subject from a completely different angle. He was saying things about the Bible that I’d never heard before, things that I’d never heard any pastor say, and I was completely confused. I found out later, after reading the Bible for myself, that what Jeremy told me was true—the things he said are actually in the Bible, and they make sense—but at that time, during that conversation, all I could think was, What are you talking about?!

That’s the sort of conversation we just read, between Jesus and Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee—he was the member of an elite group of religious leaders who knew the Jewish Scriptures backwards and forwards—and he had come to Jesus out of genuine curiosity, because Jesus was saying things the Pharisees disagreed with…but at the same time, he was doing things that were so spectacular, Nicodemus figured Jesus must come from God.

And right out of the gate, Jesus starts talking to Nicodemus about being born again, being born of water and the Spirit, about Moses and a serpent, and it was confusing—we saw him say in v. 9, “How can these things be?

In fact, over the course of this whole conversation Jesus has been telling Nicodemus why he, Jesus, was here—why he was born, why he had come.

So it makes perfect sense that this is the text we would choose to speak about at Christmas. At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ—but such a celebration makes little sense if we don’t know why his coming was so important.

And we have a summary of that entire reason in a single verse of this text—we read the whole thing so that we could know the context, but we’ll be focusing today mostly on one single verse: verse 16.

We’ll be starting with the most important thing we need to know, and that is that Christmas—and everything around it—begins with God.

I. Christmas Begins With God

I know plenty of people who don’t like Christmas. And in my experience, one of the things they have such a hard time with is the drippy sentimentality that tends to come along with the season. The Christmas carols and the decorations and the picture of baby Jesus in the manger… Christmas has become commercialized, and we know exactly how to tug on those heartstrings and make people spend more money.

The church isn’t immune to that same kind of mentality. So Christmas services in church can sometimes be, at best, empty, and at worst, manipulative.

But that will only be the case if we properly understand John 3.16, which starts by saying:

“For God so loved the world…”

It’s really easy to look at these words and get stuck on the feeling. You may have a hard time with the idea that an all-powerful God would something as sentimental as love. You may have a hard time with the idea that God would feel love for the world, which is so broken. Or you may think about what you feel when you feel love, and just stop there—you may think that these words are talking about a feeling God has which is similar to what we feel toward those we love.

They’re not.

When the Bible talks about God’s love for the world he created, it’s not talking about how God feels about the world. It’s talking about God’s intention—his intention toward a world that is defined by two fundamental facts.

The first fundamental fact about the world is that God created the world good, and approves of the good thing he created (as we see in the book of Genesis).

The second is that since man rebelled against God, creation has been thrown into chaos. Human beings—and everyone in this room—desired to be their own masters, their own lords, rather than letting God be our God. That is what we call sin, and sin is like a cancer that has infested the world with sickness and death and corruption.

So when the Bible talks about the “love” of God, it’s not talking about a feeling, but rather a very simple truth: that the God who created the world good absolutely refuses to let sin win.

Christmas—the story of Christ’s coming—isn’t a sentimental story; it is the self-initiated mission of God toward a world trapped in darkness. It’s a darkness we wanted, as Jesus says in v. 19:

…the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.

The world is no longer lovable. It’s resistant. It doesn’t love light, because it is dark. It doesn’t love God and it doesn’t want God. That disregard for our Creator is at the root of every evil in the world, because in disregarding God, we are disregarding the source of everything that’s good.

But God loves anyway. He refuses to accept the resistance of a world that’s rejected him.

Think about what this means. A lot of us carry around with us the idea (or maybe just the feeling) that God is distant or disinterested—that even if he’s out there, he can’t possibly pay any mind to tiny things like us.

Christmas dismantles that idea, as we’ll see.

What we celebrate at Christmas isn’t sentimentality; it isn’t warm feelings. At Christmas we celebrate grace, moving toward hostility. We celebrate God’s love, which isn’t reactive, but originating. It is given before the people who receive it have done anything to deserve it.

Christmas begins with God.

Now that said, let’s go further. There’s a kind of love that heals, and a kind of love that hurts. Many of you may have experienced this when you were little—you have a bad cold, your nose is stuffy, what did your parents do? They had to get that awful plunger and flush your nose out. It’s terrible. But that is love: it is active love. They want to help you heal, so they do something that feels awful short-term.

That’s the sort of love that the world needs, because it has been corrupted by sin. The removal of sin is by necessity a violent, invasive thing—sin has to be judged, and getting rid of it will be painful. Getting rid of sin would mean, in fact, getting rid of sinners—which means getting rid of every human being who’s ever lived. In order to get rid of sin, God has to judge sin.

But here’s the question that Christmas answers: what if the solution to sin could not only be a judgment against sin…but also a gift to sinners?

II. The Gift: God’s Son

Now you may or may not know that Christians have always believed in what we call the “Trinity”—that is, there is one God, who has always existed in three distinct persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father isn’t the Son, the Son isn’t the Spirit, the Spirit isn’t the Father. But the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. How is this possible? I have no idea; no one does. If we did, we’d be God. We don’t need to understand how it works; we just need to know that this is what the Bible says.

Why did I bring this up? Because John says that:

God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son…”

The gift God gives is infinitely costly—it is the gift of his “only Son”.

That word “only” doesn’t just mean God didn’t have any other kids. It means that the relationship between God the Father and God the Son is entirely and completely unique. God, in response to the world that rejected him, gives himself—his Son. God takes on a human nature, he takes on human flesh, and is born as a human being.

He’s born just like any human being—as a baby. He’s fragile; he’s helpless; for the first years of his life, he needs someone else to feed him and change him and clean him and protect him.

Why did he come this way? Why didn’t he just come as a warrior, or as a full-grown man? Why come as a baby, like the rest of us?

Because God’s plan to save us was nothing we would have expected.

We say that Jesus is the Savior, and he is; but he’s not the kind of Savior we would have asked for. He didn’t just come as a rescuer; he came as a replacement. A substitute.

Jesus experienced everything we do. He got sick; he got tired; he was sad and happy and angry and disheartened and encouraged and even sometimes afraid. He was tempted to do wrong. He experienced everything we do, and he did it so that he could be our substitute. He wouldn’t be a fitting substitute if he came as anything other than a man. He lived a life like us, in all of our weakness—but without ever falling into the traps of sin that we fall into.

And because of this totally unique life he lived—totally human and yet totally divine, without sin—he was able to do what we could not. He took the sin of his people on himself, and was punished in our place, for our sin.

That is the gospel. Jesus takes our sin, is judged for our sin, and gives us his perfectly righteous, morally pure life.

Sin is violently, brutally punished…and sinners receive life.

We’re all used to these images of the manger at Christmas, and we’re used to the manger evoking warm and fuzzy feelings. But the manger is inseparable from the cross.

You see, Christmas forces us to re-examine what love really is. It’s not just a feeling; real love gives sacrificially, intentionally, at a great cost.

III. The Call: Believe and Live

God’s love for the world prompted him to give a gift, the gift of his Son. But all of us know that a gift serves absolutely no purpose if it stays wrapped under the tree. A gift is pointless if it isn’t opened and enjoyed.

Same thing here. God gives a gift, and he calls us to make the choice to receive that gift. What does receiving that gift look like? Jesus tells us:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him…”

I don’t know many of you here today. But I do remember what it was like to be someone who was unconvinced, but curious. That’s what we see in this text; this man Nicodemus comes to Jesus looking for answers; he’s not 100% convinced, but he’s curious, and he’s searching. Jesus tells Nicodemus what he really needs, but Nicodemus doesn’t understand what that means.

So Jesus puts the facts before him.

Jesus’s coming demands a response. In order to receive the gift of God’s Son, we must believe in him.

Now when the Bible talks about belief, it doesn’t mean the same kind of belief we think of today. We think of belief as a purely intellectual thing: I see it, so I believe it. I have the proof, so I believe it.

Belief in the Bible isn’t mainly an intellectual exercise.

It’s more like sitting in a chair.

A while back we invited a buddy of mine over for lunch. He sat at our table, in chairs we’ve used for years; he didn’t think twice about it. He’s not a huge guy, but the chair apparently had a tiny crack in the leg, and over the course of about thirty seconds during our meal, he slowly sunk to the ground, the chair crumbling under his weight.

I could take this chair, and look at it.  I can see what it’s made of; I can examine the legs and the seat and the backrest. And I can be reasonably sure that it will hold my weight. But the only way I can be absolutely, 100% certain is to sit in the chair, and see that it holds me.

That’s what belief is; that’s what faith is. It’s not strength, and it’s not intellect, and it’s not having all the answers to all our questions. It’s trusting. It’s accepting, even when we don’t fully understand.

Knowing the story is not the same as receiving the Son. Christmas invites us to a decisive faith, not seasonal nostalgia.

It’s not automatic salvation; it is offered salvation. It’s a gift that is held out, but not forced. To receive the gift, we must believe. We must entrust ourselves to the Son who was given.

IV. The Outcome: From Death to Life

So God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son for us; he calls us to believe in the Son he sent—why? What’s the goal?

It’s almost like a second gift. God gave his Son—and already (those of us who know him can attest), that is a wonderful enough gift. But when we receive Jesus, we also receive another gift.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

If you’ve been following, this makes complete sense. We die because we’ve sinned; if we are freed from sin, then we are also free from death—not physical death, but the death after death, an eternity separated from the God who created us.

And that’s the most important thing to see in this last part. The idea of “eternal life” can be off-putting, because—well, because it’s so long. And a lot of us have grown up with ideas of heaven that come more from cartoons than from the Bible: ideas of floating on clouds, playing the harp for all eternity. I agree, that sounds awful.

The eternal life the Bible promises is so much better, so much more down-to-earth than that. It promises life—like the ones we have now, in real, physical bodies, with real, physical things to do in a real, physical world…but totally unencumbered by sin and its effects.

And the best part of it all is not even that eternal life won’t be boring, or that it won’t be only spiritual. The best part of the promise of eternal life is that it will be life with the God who created us. Think of it like this: there is no one better than the Creator of life to tell us what life should be like. And the eternal life that is promised to us is that life, life as it should be—beginning now, and continuing on forever, freed from the shackles sin puts on us.

That’s what Christmas brings to those who trust in Christ. The baby in the manger brings the life humanity lost, the life the world cannot produce. As C.S. Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

That is what God gives us in his Son, and this eternal life is qualitative as much as quantitative: it’s not just long—it’s life with God, under God, from God, now and forever.

Conclusion

That is what we celebrate at Christmas. It isn’t family; it isn’t nostalgia; it isn’t chocolate; it isn’t presents. Christmas isn’t a celebration of sentimentalism, and it isn’t an attempt to escape from the harsh realities of life. Christmas is a confrontation with what reality truly is: a broken world under judgment that God moves to rescue.

I’m so happy you came to be with us today. And I’d like to finish in a very simple way.

I’d like to invite you to see the love of God—his sacrificial, active, self-giving love.

Receive the Son of God—trust him, even if you still have questions. Any number of us here can attest that he is indeed trustworthy.

And once you trust in him, walk in his life.

The world’s gifts fade. This one never does. Don’t leave it unopened.