Sermon:
December 30, 2001
Sunday Night Alive!  

Scripture:
Isaiah 40:3-5

"I want to live again! I want to live again!" George Bailey cried as he stood on the snow-covered, iron bridge, the dark water swirling below him. With the help of Angel Second Class Clarence Oddbody (who liked rum punch), George had just discovered what life would be like had he never been born.

Anyone who’s watched the film It’s a Wonderful Life knows that Bedford Falls had become Pottersville. Main Street became a red light district. Currier and Ives became Sodom and Gomorrah. All because George had never been born.

One person can make an enormous difference in the lives of other people—in a community or an entire culture. You are an unrepeatable miracle of God. Without you the world would not be the same. Your life was planned and designed by God.

But what if Jesus had never been born? What would be different if a Bethlehem stable had no visitors 2001 years ago?

Jesus, the greatest man who ever lived, has changed virtually every aspect of human life—and most of us don’t even think about it. I don’t know if it has to do with September 11^th, but I’ve had an easier time making the connection between each Christmas light I see and the birth of our Savior. I do worry that we have trivialized Christmas, though. Without Christmas, where would we be?

Indeed, much of the crooked has become straight and the rough places plain. Much of what we enjoy today finds its roots in Christ and his teachings. Yet Christianity is ridiculed. Many view it as a barrier to progress, and Christianity is the one safe target for insult and prejudice.

Obviously, the church throughout history has strayed badly at times from Christ’s teaching—for example, during the Crusades, the Inquisition, and anti-Semitist times. But the overwhelming impact of Christ on earth has been good. I simply want to name five: respect for life, status of women, the family, science, and education.

Historians tell us that in classical Rome or Greece, it was dangerous to conceive a baby. Abortion seems to have been practiced, and sick or unwanted babies were abandoned to forests or mountainsides. Then Jesus came. He came as a baby, conceived in a virgin’s womb. He humbled himself. Since then, and because of Jesus’ care of the poor and sick, we Christians cherish life as sacred. In ancient Rome, Christians saved babies and brought them up in the faith. Others started orphanages and nurseries. Our ethic of the value of human life comes from a foundation created by these practices.

Women, too, have benefited. In ancient cultures, the wife was the property of her husband. Prior to Christian influences in India, women would be killed upon the death of their husband. Many cultures still struggle with basic freedoms for women. The Taliban have taken it to the Nth degree. Charles Spurgeon told of a Hindu woman who said to a missionary: "Surely your Bible was written by a woman." "Why?" "Because it says so many kind things for women." How ironic that many radical feminists do not give any credit to Christ.

As Christians grew in number, a new standard was set for people in living as a family. In AD 125, Aristides, an Athenian philosopher, wrote a defense of the Christian faith to Emperor Hadrian. Regarding sexual matters he wrote: "They do not commit adultery or immorality… Their wives, O king, are as pure as virgins, and their daughters are modest. Their men abstain from all unlawful (sexual) contact and from impurity, in the hopes of recompense that is to come from another world." Christianity has helped preserve the family as the basic unit of society. It has protected millions of people from diseases.

Advancements in science and education, too, are in part a consequence of Christianity. Francis Schaeffer points out that modern science was born out of the Christian worldview, because of the medieval insistence on the rationality of God. God’s creation could be measured and made sense of.

Education of the masses goes back to the Reformation— especially John Calvin. The Reformers believed the only way the Protestant Reformation would hold would be if lay people could read the Bible for themselves. Christ himself encouraged learning. The greatest universities were started by followers of Jesus, for Christian purposes. Engraved in stone at Harvard’s entrance are these words:

After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear’d convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government: One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.

Had Jesus never been born, we would remain in the darkness of ignorance and sin and brokenness. The message of Jesus brings transformation and new life even to this life for those who allow him in. Jesus really is the Light of the World.

The Rockettes’ Christmas show has it right. They end with a beautiful nativity, and a screen on which they project these words:

Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until he was 30, and then traveled the country preaching. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never owned a home. He never had a family of his own. He never went to college. He never traveled more than 200 miles from the place where he was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompanies greatness. He had no credentials but himself.

While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. His executioners gambled for the only piece of property he had when he was dying. When he was dead, he was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and today he is the centerpiece of the human race, and the leader of the column of progress.

I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built, and all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of humanity upon this earth as has that one solitary life.

But as great as all the benefits are in this world, it isn’t as good as it gets. Christ’s resurrection brings transforming power to your life and my life, including the gift of eternal life, for those who put their trust in him. Have you received him? And if you have, have you shared him with someone else?