by Pastor Mark Chin
During the past several Christmas seasons, Lexus has run their aptly named Lexus’ December to Remember commercials – with the tag line, if you’re going to wish, wish big. These commercials open with parents coaching young children, as their proxies, to ask Santa for their very big wish – their big hope for Christmas. The commercials then cut to an ecstatic family, opening their front door Christmas morning to a fat new Lexus wrapped in a red bow, sitting in their driveway. What the marketers for Lexus are well aware of, based on no shortage of research, is that in a consumer society, images of shiny new luxury items wrapped in a bow magically appearing on our doorstep presses big buttons for most of us. Honestly, how many of us find ourselves getting excited or dreaming about waking up Christmas morning to find someone else’s old run down car in our driveway – with or without a big red bow?
Lexus, like many things in our world – be it our education, jobs, relationships, or politicians, is selling us on a piece of the American Dream, something most Americans are enamored with – the hope of something new, something better, something improved, something superior. Who doesn’t prefer the new model, with all its upgrades, free of all the problems of the tired old model? Sadly, however, what is true of our cars is also true of our jobs, our relationships, our spouses, our churches, our talents, our abilities, our achievements and, quite frankly, most of the things we frequently place our hopes in.
What is new quickly becomes old. The new car becomes the old car with all its expenses and repairs. The amazing new job becomes the old job with its familiar challenges. The new relationship becomes the old relationship where new conflicts become old conflicts, and the exciting new church becomes the boring old church struggling with the same old issues. And so our hearts drift from one thing to the next, searching for the next new thing, looking for the next new breath of hope, often overlooking an even sadder truth. All these new things may enable us to forget about the sin and sadness of our world for a minute or a moment – but they can’t make it go away. The truth of the matter is that the hope these things offer is temporary & limited – something we all know deep down inside. Many of these things fit the category of what God, through Jeremiah, referred to as broken cisterns in contrast to Him, the fountain of living waters.
As we come to God’s Word, specifically His accounts of the advent – the arrival, the coming, and the presence – of His Son Jesus Christ found in Matthew and Luke’s Gospel, God Himself offers us a hope that far exceeds the hopes of many of things we hope for at Christmas. It is a hope that is quite literally, out of this world – a hope that sustains the child of God in the darkest of times, even when friends, jobs, pastors, spouses, churches, and everything else in this world comes up short. It is the hope of new life in His Son Jesus Christ. Unlike a Lexus or a job, this new life never gets old. The best this world can offer is a new lifestyle. What God offers to all sinners in and through His Son, Jesus Christ, is a new life – one that transforms us completely from the inside out, beginning with our sinful hearts. And unlike Lexus, He doesn’t charge a dime for it because in love He has picked up the tab at great cost to Himself. This is not only the testimony of the Christmas story – this is the testimony of the entirety of Jesus ministry here on earth. To the woman at the well, Jesus in John 4:13,14 says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” In John 10:10 Jesus says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” And to Martha in John 11:25,26, He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
The Apostle Paul believed this – and hoped in it with the entirety of his life. It is this hope that sustained him through shipwreck, beatings, prison, rejection, and the betrayal of many professing believers. It is a hope that became a reality for Paul with the new birth that Paul himself had experienced first hand on the road to Damascus. When Paul declared in 2 Cor. 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come,” he was not merely affirming a theological truth promised throughout the Scriptures, he was affirming a biblical truth that he was living first hand by faith in Christ as Savior and Lord. In Christ, Paul received not only the forgiveness of His sin, he received a new heart and a new life that was no longer bound by sin or the things of this world. Paul’s hope – his certain expectation that all things would work together for good – was anchored in the reality of who Jesus is and who Paul was in Christ. Christ’s very real presence in Paul’s life, by faith, gave Paul God’s living and eternal hope – the hope of new life in Christ. What are you hoping for this Christmas?