Well today, we are 1 week away from what has always been one of my favorite days of the year, Christmas!  I’m reminded each year of Christmas’s gone by.  Times when I was a kid and the excitement of Christmas morning.  The time we had as a family when all was good and there were no worries in the world.  The trips to my grandparents each year to spend the day with the rest of our family. Then as I was married and had a family, seeing the same joy of Christmas in my children as they have grown.

Something changed, however, in the past couple of years.  I’ve always know that we Christmas was meant to mark the birth of Jesus.  We always see those nice manger scenes all over and the signs that say happy birthday Jesus.  But to me, as I have grown in my walk with God and have grown to know Him more, I know it is so much more than that now.  It is now a reminder each year, despite all of the distractions we have, of God’s endless pursuit of our hearts and His desire to restore us to who we were always meant to be as His children and image bearers.

I wrote about year ago about The Great Invasion that Christmas symbolizes.  God’s willingness to pursue us behind enemy lines and sneak in through the womb of a teenage girl.  It was exactly that.  Jesus’s first coming was a covert action that invaded a world that had been handed over to the prince of this world, Satan, in order to win back the hearts of man.

With that, I see Christmas a reminder each year, that God has been willing to go through some extraordinary lengths in order to restore our hearts to Him.  There are so many that this has been lost on.  Christmas is much more than what we have made it out to be.  There is this one commercial that come on that drive we crazy, where a lady sings that Christmas does not happen without her.  Every time I see it, I say, ‘I beg to differ.’  This secular world has skewed us from what Christmas is.  Because of Jesus’s coming and because of His willingness to live as man and to ultimately die for us, we can be made alive like never before.  We can now freely pursue God and live to glorify Him and be sanctified as saints living for Him.

We have to look at God’s great and epic story to really appreciate this.  It is laid out in His Word, Genesis to Revelation.  His 66 book love story of His desire, after we jacked it all up, of wanting to restore man.  Through all of the failures and trials that man suffered, God was always there with a desire to restore us.  With the coming of Jesus, God gave us the example of who we were meant to be and now we can live alive in Christ.

I love this time of year.  I love the time I get with my family to celebrate the season.  I love old school Christmas songs.  All about the classics.  But now through it all, I recognize and we should all recognize the absolute significance of what Christmas symbolizes.  A God that loves us with out end and was willing to go through extraordinary lengths to win back our hearts.  Something I am ever thankful for.  To have a God that loves me that much that He was wiling to become man, sneak into this world, live as man, and die to set us free.  Heavens invasion of this world, some 2,000 years ago, was just the beginning.