If you don’t understand the purpose of Christmas, you might as well skip the Christmas lights and decorations this year. You might as well forget about buying Christmas presents. You might as well forget Christmas dinner.
If you don’t know why we celebrate Christmas, all the festivities are pointless.
To find the purpose of Christmas, you have to fast forward beyond the manger, the Wise Men, and the shepherds. Jesus told us the reason He came to Earth on the first Christmas: “The Son of Man came to find lost people and save them” (Luke 19:10).
Quite simply, Jesus came because people are lost without God. To be spiritually lost means to be separated from God, disconnected, and out of whack. Without Jesus, everybody in the world is lost — no matter how much power, wealth, or fame they have.
And our lostness has immense ramifications on our lives. To know why Jesus came to Earth, we must understand what it means to be lost. Without God, we’ve lost:
• Our direction. We’re bound to have little understanding of where we should go and what we should do in this life.
• His protection. We’re on our own when we’re not under the Lord’s protection. That’s a huge reason many people are stressed out. They’re trying to live under their own care and protection instead of God’s.
• Our potential. We’ll never know half the gifts and talents we have if we’re not in a relationship with Him.
• Our happiness. We can have all the money and power in the world, but without God we will never have true joy.
• Our home in Heaven. God allows us to rebel while we’re here on Earth, but there’s no rebellion in Heaven.
But no one who is lost has lost one ounce of value to God. Even if you don’t have a relationship with Him, you have immense value to God. Lostness implies value. Whatever someone is willing to spend to recover something that’s lost shows how valuable that item is.
In the most famous verse in the Bible, Jesus clearly explains our value: “God loved the world so much that He gave His One and only Son so that whoever believes in Him may not be lost, but have eternal life” (John 3:16, NCV).
The Good News is God loved us so much He sent His Son to Earth on the first Christmas to seek and save us. That’s a reason to celebrate! (RICK WARREN)