Last night we bid adieu to Who Needs Christmas?. In case you missed it, here’s your recap:

Tension Sometimes we get gifts that we don’t understand. I mean, we know what the gift is, we just don’t know why we got it. And maybe the same goes for Christmas: we know that God gave us an amazing gift in Jesus, but maybe we don’t know why God gave us the gift of Jesus. And when we look around us at what all the Christmas stories are saying, it gets even more confusing because everything we see seems to have a different take on what Christmas is all about.

Truth Matthew, one of Jesus’s disciples, is able to reveal to us exactly what God’s intent is with the gift of Jesus at Christmas. We find this amazing truth in a conversation that an angel is having with Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph. Here’s what the angel says: “[Jesus] will save his people from their sins.” That’s why God sent Jesus: so that we could know true forgiveness for our sins, but also so that we could experience freedom from our sins. When we trust Jesus in a way that transforms how we love God, others, and ourselves, we find that we can experience freedom in three unique ways:

1. Sin is no longer our master–we can choose to make Christ our master! When temptation comes knocking, we can know that we don’t have to answer.
2. We are free from thinking we have to earn God’s love; God demonstrates love to us and instead of earning it, we get to respond to it out of gratitude for what God did first. That means we can serve and love others unselfishly.
3. We are free from the fear of death. Paul tells us that the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ. The scariest thing for us is death, but death isn’t more powerful than Jesus, the one who conquered death on the cross.

Application If we want to unwrap the gift of Jesus at Christmas in a way that acknowledges God’s intent, we can live as free people: free from letting sin be our master, free from trying to earn God’s love, free from fear of death. We do that when we love others unconditionally and offer that love out of gratitude for everything God has done for us.

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