Three Christmas Gifts

There’s something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. Just don’t understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents, sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed. Charlie Brown. You’re the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy’s right. Long to Charlie Brown from the world. You’re the Charlie Browniest. Charlie Brown.

Who else can resonate with Charlie Brown? If you’ve never watched that before, that is the Charlie Brown Christmas special, and that’s the very first moment of the whole thing. You know, at the tail end of that video, of that movie, Charlie Brown would go on to recite Luke 2, this birth narrative, and in that movie, you see Charlie Brown make this transformation where he starts off saying, “Hey, I am so dissatisfied. What in the world is wrong with me?” And then he gets at the very end, and he’s talking about the birth of Jesus, and he is reveling in the birth of God sending His son for us. But caught in the middle, there’s Charlie Brown. And man, who else can resonate with him?

You are going through Christmas, and you just aren’t quite satisfied, right? The gift giving, the Christmas card receiving, family meal planning, even candlelight service attending. The magic of these things tends to wear off. And oftentimes, it can leave us feeling empty, even confused. And then, you know, we’re going through Christmas. Maybe you’ve lost a loved one this year. And you know that Christmas just won’t be the same without. Maybe that’s where you’re at. Maybe you’re feeling a bit like Charlie Brown.

But what if I told you there’s a better, deeper experience of Christmas, something that can lift us out of these seasonal blues and even transform our perspective on the season? I believe that God wants to give us a better, deeper, richer perspective on Christmas, one that even Charlie Brown would give into later in that special. And that perspective comes from three incredible Christmas gifts that God has for you.

Now, to understand what these gifts are, I’m going to need a little bit of help. Could I have like an elementary schooler come and volunteer for something? I really need like a third, fourth, fifth grader. All right. First come, first serve. All right, Fowler, come on up, buddy. Let’s give him a round of applause for being, yeah. You’ve got no idea what you’re getting yourself into, do you? Are you prepared for the consequences? Okay. No, there’s nothing bad. All right. Let’s see what the first gift is that God wants to give us. All right. You might open this bad boy up for us. You got to kind of dig through it. All right. Being a little too, a little too polite about the digging. Okay. There we go. All right. You open that up. What’s that? Can you tell us what, what’s that say? It says, let me read it again. It’s got that down. Salvation. There we go. Let’s hear it for Fowler. All right. Man, we just boxed it all back there. Yeah. Thanks, man.

So, God wants to give us gifts for Christmas. I said it earlier in my prayer. I don’t know if you heard it. Christmas is a birthday where we celebrate someone else’s birth and we get the gifts for it. And Fowler, I’ll be honest. That’s all I got for you, man. If you just want to go ahead and take your seat.

God’s word says this in 1 John 5:11. This is the testimony. God has given us eternal life. And this life is in His son. You see, friend, God gives. God’s a giver at His very heart. And He gives us life. And the life that God has to give you is eternal. Family, friends, good jobs and experiences, they can’t actually provide what we want, what we crave. Because family lets us down, friends change, good jobs can be lost, and no experience lasts forever. We all need a better source of life. And God wants to give that to you. You can have that. You can have life. And that life is in Jesus Christ, the son of God.

You see, we celebrate Christmas because the son of God left His home in heaven to come and give us something. He came to save us, to give us His perfect life, death, and death. Life, death, and resurrection. If you are here tonight and you are still wondering, is there a God? Now, please know this. There Is a good God, and He is wild about you. Utterly. He is utterly captivated with you. And He has already offered you the very best gift you could ever have: eternal life. And that life is in His Son, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself up for you. But that’s not it. There is another gift that God wants to give us. Let me open this second box. I do it a little less politely than my man Fowler did. The second gift that God wants to give us is satisfaction. 1 John 5:12, the very next verse in our passage, says this: “The one who has the Son has life. The one who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Simple as that, Paula. Because true life is only in Jesus, that means that only those who have Jesus are those who are truly alive.

This is not exactly politically correct. You may not have come to a candlelight service wanting to hear this, but here’s the deal. It’s only folks who accepted the good news of the gospel who have real life. And no matter how positive, no matter how strong, how vivacious, no matter how well off someone is, there is no life outside of Jesus Christ. But for those who have Jesus, we are free, and we are free indeed. True life can be yours if you will only reach out and accept the gift that God has for you. When you embrace the love of God in Jesus Christ for the gift of salvation, God then takes your soul like a cup, and He starts to pour His life into it, filling you up with Himself. And when God fills you with Himself, Psalm 16:11 says that in the presence of God is fullness of joy, and at His right hand are pleasures forevermore. Not rules, not religion, not striving. It is pleasure and joy that God has for you.

Hallmark and Walmart actually like when we finish the Christmas season a little disappointed. They do, because if we’re satisfied, they stop making money. To be honest, Hallmark and Walmart want to present a type of Christmas where we have to continue to work, and it leaves us feeling unsatisfied, like trying to fill up on cotton candy. But God wants us to be satisfied. And that’s why He gives us His Son Jesus, not just that we’ll be saved, but so that we’ll be filled with life to the brim.

There’s a final gift that God has for us. Do I have one more brave volunteer? All right, I’ve got… All right, come on, buddy. Come on, Rhett. Let’s give Rhett a round of applause as well. You know the drill at this point, my friend. So that could be the gift of certainty. Do you know what it means to be certain of something, Rhett? 100% sure, that’s right. Let’s give it up. Good job, buddy. There we go. All right, Rhett, you’re good, man. Full van of white for me. I appreciate it.

So I’ve read 1 John 5:11 and 12. It doesn’t get more creative than this. I’ll just read verse 13 for us. John says this: “I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you can know you have eternal life.” God doesn’t just want to save us. He doesn’t just want to satisfy us, but He also wants to give us a certain certainty in Himself so that we aren’t wishy-washy. We’re not guessing about things. We can have some rock-solid confidence as we go through this life and into the one to come. Christmas is about God pouring a rock-solid concrete foundation for you to live your life on. God wants us to go through life and this Christmas season totally alive in His Son, totally satisfied in Him, and with total assurance that we are in Christ.

You see, Christianity is not a blind faith. It’s not. Christianity is an assured faith. It’s a confident faith. God wants us to have confidence in Himself. Jesus gives us certainty. The Bible, you see, it’s a record of God’s incredible love for you. It is. If you approach the Bible just as a book of rules to keep, you could totally miss the point of God’s heart for you. Because the truth of the matter is, whether it’s one rule, 10 commandments, or the 600-some-odd commandments of the Old Testament, we can’t keep them. Adam and Eve, in the very beginning, were only given one rule: don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Years and decades and families later, Moses, or through Moses, God gives the people of Israel 10 rules: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, minds, you know, and don’t commit adultery, things like that. And man, they couldn’t keep 10 rules. And us today, we can’t keep the rules. The Bible’s not a, it’s not a rule book. The Bible is a, it’s a love story. It’s a story about how God is pursuing us and making a way for us to know Him again. The Bible is captured for us to have confidence and certainty about eternal life.

So the question is, are you a little like Charlie Brown, going through the Christmas season with a sense of disappointment and even some emptiness, wishing there was something more? My invitation to you, my words to you, be to accept the gift. God wants to give you life. He wants to satisfy you. And He wants to help you walk out of here totally assured of His deep love for you.

And if you’ve accepted these gifts, if you’ve been walking with the Lord for any amount of time, then my invitation to you is that over the next few days, as you get together with family, as you give and receive gifts, remember the reason for the season is totally about Jesus Christ. Those other things are good. They’re not satisfying. Those other things are good. They can’t give you the life you want. Those other things are good. But at the end of the day, they don’t give you the confidence that you need to be able to walk through this life and then the one to come.

If these gifts appeal to you in any way, then I, man, I’d invite you to come back in 2025. We’re going to spend an intentional season of pursuing a deeper relationship with God, just trying to figure out what does it look like to lean even harder into these gifts that God has for us.

In the meantime, let me pray for you. Father, You do so much for us, God. God, You’ve made us. You’ve made a way for us to know You. You love us deeply and completely and totally. God, I pray that we would know what that love is and that we would walk in that love. We’d be totally assured of that, please. God, for anybody in this room that does not know that You love them, God, would You please seal that in their minds and in their hearts right now? God, as we sing one final song, that Silent Night, we walk out of here, savoring the light of the world, born as a baby, and will we take that light into the world?