Sometimes the Christmas songs we hear at this time of year mislead us. When we hear Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Winter Wonderland, and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, we begin to believe that the setting for Christmas is joy upon joy. The reality, however, is that Christmas is about God entering a desperate situation and a tragic world with heavenly hope.
God looked upon planet earth and saw a world disastrously crippled by hate and sin and division and corruption and cruelty and death. That’s not what God wanted for the inhabitants of this world, so God left the perfect joyfulness of heaven to bring love into this sin-filled planet. That’s what the first Christmas was about, and it’s what God continues to do.
When Christmas arrived in 1863, our nation was deeply divided by the War Between the States. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sat in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, listening in despair to the bells of a nearby church. Early on, he had taken a courageous and outspoken stand in favor of abolition in his Poems on Slavery. Yet, as he sat in his home listening to those bells, he grieved for his divided country, and he worried about his son, a young Army lieutenant who had been wounded in battle.
In anguish, he wrote: “There is no peace on earth, for hate is strong and mocks the song of ‘Peace on earth; good will to men.'”
But then the deeper truth and hope of Christmas filled his soul. He continued: “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: ‘God is not dead; nor doth He sleep!’ The wrong shall fail; the right prevail, with ‘Peace on earth, good will to men!'”
Edmund H. Sears also recalled the deeper truth and hope of Christmas, that God meets us in the struggles of our lives. In his Christmas carol It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, he wrote, “And ye, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow, look now! for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing. O rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing!”
No matter what struggles or discouragements you are facing at this time in your life, remember the deepest truth and hope of Christmas: God continues to love us so much that he keeps bringing heavenly love into our troubled situations.