Christmas: Room for Christ?

Thanksgiving is past. All around us the doors of malls and stores are open for Christmas. The commercial and secular world is reaching out to grasp Christmas with expectation.

But what kind of Christmas? A Christmas of temporal possessions, of material gain, and perhaps of subsequent disillusionment. At best, a Christmas of human philanthropy.

Room lacking

Ironically, society’s Christmas appears to have room for every gadget, buyer and person except the living Christ Himself. For the Christ-child, there is no room. No room for what He represents. No room for what He has done. No room for whom He is. No room for His free gift of grace.

Room for feasting, but not for Jesus as the Bread of Life! Room for multicolored lights, but not for Jesus as the Star of Jacob and the Sun of Righteousness! Room for a Christmas tree, but not room for the living Tree of Life whose leaves are given for the healing of the nations! Room for exchange of human wishes by voice and card, but not for heaven’s personally addressed Christmas message: “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Lk. 2:11)! Room for the exchange of temporal gifts, but not for God’s eternally unspeakable Gift — the Christ-child of Bethlehem!

But let’s move beyond the secularized commercial world. As in all else, when we point one finger at others, we point three at ourselves. Are not we who have heard the gospel in all its clarity as the gracious gift of God far more guilty when we have no room for the Christ of Christmas?

By nature we are no better than the world around us. Nor are we more open for the reception of Jesus than was the world into which the Child was born: “And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Lk. 2:7).

No room for them! There was room for the rich traveler, but not for poor Joseph and Mary, despite her being “great with child.”

Oh, my friends, how deeply symbolic the innkeeper’s rejection of the Christ-child is of the enmity and rejection of Jesus in our hearts by nature! How dead we are in trespasses and sin — so dead that we have no room for the Prince of Life!

Have we ever seen our blindness and poverty in our lack of room for Jesus? Here total depravity climaxes in stark unbelief: No room for Jesus! No room for the one thing needful! No room for the prime purpose and meaning of life!

No room for the unveiling in Christmas of the world’s greatest miracle and mystery! No room for the Messiah who is God’s unspeakable gospel tidings! No room for the Prince of glory as a Babe in a manger! No room for the immortal Son clothed with the rags of mortality!

Dear reader, given our desperate need for Jesus by nature, is not this truth most staggering: no room for Jesus Christ, the only Savior?

Surely Rev. Ledeboer was right when he noted that our greatest misery is ignorance of our misery. Unrecognized ignorance and unrealized blindness lie at the heart of our depravity.

Total depravity: has it become total reality for us?

Room formed

Paradoxically, through becoming aware of our lack of room for Christ, spiritual room is formed in the “inn” of the hearts of the elect by the saving operations of the Holy Spirit. Our nature defiantly posts “NO VACANCY” signs for Jesus, but free grace changes our signs to “FULL VACANCY.” By nature we have room for everything and everyone except Jesus, but the Spirit instructs that we need nothing and no one else than Jesus.

By convicting of sin, actual and original, the Holy Spirit leads God’s people to need the Christ-child as sole Deliverer. He makes room for both God’s promise and His Bethlehem Child by stripping away all grounds of self-salvation — prayer, religion, piety, reformation, humility, love, and repentance inclusive.

The Spirit teaches poor sinners that Christ is needed on all fronts. For guilt, there is Christ’s reconciling blood. For the law, Christ is Law-fulfiller and Cursebearer. For conscience, Christ is both Victor and victory, for there is no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1). For God’s attributes, righteousness and peace are met together in Him (Ps. 85:10). For punishment, Christ’s passive obedience is efficient for the sins of all His elect. For death, hell, and grave, Christ has the keys in His hand (Rev. 1:18).

In short, the Holy Spirit forms within His people the Advent cry which, in God’s ripe hour of love, gives birth to Christmas realization: “Give me Jesus, else I die.” Then empty hearts may be filled with the benefits and Person of Christ to the praise of God’s one-sided, sovereign work of free grace.

Room filled

True believer, you know that only Jesus Christ can and does fill the empty cup of your sin-stained, condemnable heart. Oh, unforgettable hour it was when your cup first overflowed as your heart glimpsed the fullness of a poor Infant born for poor sinners! Unforgettable hour when Christ was first revealed as a complete meriting and applying Savior who cried out on Calvary, “It is finished!” And was it not an unforgettable hour when you may have been given to experience with Martin Luther that the vital reality of all true religion lies in its personal pronouns? Did you not then stagger beneath amazing grace speaking to your soul with power: “My son, my daughter, thy sins be forgiven thee....Unto you is born in the city of David, a Savior.... I am thy salvation....”?

Oh, the preciousness of an empty heart being filled with Jesus Christ is unspeakable! For the “self-emptied,” He is altogether lovely, the Chief among ten thousand, white and ruddy.

And He is altogether sufficient. He “full-fills” your every need, child of God. He is your Refuge and Strength, a very present help in trouble (Ps. 46:1). In Him, you have everything you need for time and eternity.

In Christ you are filled with the salvation of God, for He is the essence of all covenantal blessings. In Him dwells divine fullness. He is the treasury of grace’s all-sufficiency. In Christ your empty heart may be filled with a salvation that can never be thwarted, a righteousness that can never be tarnished, and a title that can never be clouded.

Yes, Christ is all. Christ is all in the Father’s vision and eternal covenant. Christ is all in Scripture’s pages. Christ is all in the soul’s desire. Christ is all in the heart’s experience. Christ is all in the midnight of sin. Christ is all in salvation’s dawning light and noonday sun. Christ is all in free, sovereign, atoning grace.

Room continually filled

Yes, true believer, this is your desire. You yearn to learn the art of retaining an over- and ever-flowing cup of divine grace in the face of Jesus Christ. For so often your spiritual life lies between an empty cup of need and a full cup of blessing. Too often you feel like a half cup of lukewarm coffee — neither cold nor hot, empty nor full. “How,” you ask, “may I retain by grace an overflowing cup?”

Allow me to provide you with four directives:

First, beg for grace to keep your cup upright close to the fountain; yes, directly under Jehovah’s ever-bubbling stream in Christ Jesus. Refuse to turn from the living waters of Christ to the broken cisterns of self. Seek grace to meditate much on the triune God of grace: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Search the Scriptures to ascertain what each has performed for the salvation of sinners such as you.

God will fill your cup with the Christ-child to the measure that it is empty of all outside of Him

Second, beg for grace to keep your soul empty of all that is not God and Christ. Especially strive to remain empty of yourself, remembering the humble confession of John Owen: “We are too big in ourselves when we do well, and too little in Christ in our failings.” Too often, even were God to shed His love upon us, we would not have room to receive it, for we are brim-full with self- and God-given religion: prayerless and prayerful prayers, pride and humility, unworthiness and worthiness, missing and received texts, spoiled and fresh manna, miseries and graces. We are filled either with what we have done or what God has done, or both. How seldom do God’s gifts and graces drive us to our Giver! Too often we live more for “Christmas presents” than Christ’s presence, more for the blessings of Christ than for the Father who has sent Him. Too few are the moments when we are filled with Christ, who empties us again, and sends us to the Father to end in a triune God with Paul, “Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable Gift” (2 Cor. 9:15). Be assured, child of God, God will fill your cup with the Christ-child to the measure that it is empty of all outside of Him. Complain not at the delay of His visitations, until you can say by renewal, “Give me Jesus, else I die”; and once there, labor to abide in a filling Christ, for, “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no

more can ye,” Christ taught, “except ye abide in Me” (Jn. 15:4).

Third, beg for grace to drink deeply of what God does set before you. Despite unworthiness, drink as the Spirit enables. Drink all the more on account of your unworthiness. A hungry and thirsty guest cannot remain a bashful guest when nourishing food and drink is set before him. Remember, child of God, there is such a thing as proud humility which counts the drinking of God’s graces to be presumption even when the soul is fainting for thirst. Active, God-honoring faith speaks a different language: “I know God’s graces are too good for me, and I am not worthy of the least of them; but if God places them before me, and invites me to eat and drink, I will not push them away out of false piety. My need is too great; my hunger, too severe; my thirst, too painful; my case too desperate. I will drink unashamedly, freely acknowledging God to be my royal Giver, and I, His famished beggar. By grace I will come boldly to the throne of grace to obtain mercy in time of need (Heb. 4:16).”

Finally, beg for grace to share the overflow you have received. Though spiritual life cannot be communicated from one to another, yet God’s child will seek to do so, for he desires grace for the whole world. He will magnify the goodness of the Lord, and proclaim Him as the Name of names. As John Trapp quipped, “Those that have true happiness must carry their cup upright, and see that it overflows into their poor brethren’s emptier vessels.”

Do you have room for Christ in Christmas? Have you, by grace, experienced room lacking, room formed, room filled, room continually filled?

Dr. J.R. Beeke is pastor of the First Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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