The Christmas celebration is one of joy and excitement. No matter your age there is always something special about Christmas morning and the days that follow. We know that we are a part of something unique and everlasting.

Truly, Christmas reveals so much about life, faith and family.

First, Christmas shows what life is about and what life’s goal is. These days are meant to invoke a sense of deep wonder. The Christian claim is that the God of the universe, who made the billions of stars and billions of galaxies—the God who knows everything about you—became man and was born of a woman.

It is one thing to claim that God is real. “About nine-in-ten U.S. adults believe in God or another higher power,” according to the Pew Research Center. However, it is a totally different thing to claim that this God is personal, cares about you and became man to save you.

While the culture does generally tend to be less interested in God there are signs of hope. 

Recent studies from Pew also note that religious stability in America has remained steady since 2020, while highlighting that 70% of Americans are affiliated with a religion and 46% say they pray daily.

The Christian claim is amazing because it is a truth claim. Followers of Jesus hold that he was God (as proven through his miracles and resurrection). That he was born at a real time and in a real place. That he fulfilled the well-over 300 prophecies of who the Messiah would be that are found written in the Hebrew Scriptures (which are written over thousands of years by dozens of people who did not know each other).

If the Christian claim that Jesus is God and that he was born among us is true, then our lives are meant to revolve around him. It means that our God does not wait on the sidelines of existence but is involved in our lives.

It also means that you can have a true relationship with God because He is always with you. This is the second critical reminder that Christmas reveals to us: faith is a relationship.

For this reason, Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Christmas means that God has a face. However, that also means that the God who became one of us can be ignored. The baby placed in the manger is tiny, seemingly insignificant. He is easily overlooked and ignored by the majority of those in Bethlehem that night. Christmas is an amazing celebration but it is also a challenge to humanity: God came so close to us that we can choose to be indifferent to Him.

The invitation of this season, and the Christian faith, is to accept his call to make Him the center of our lives because then we enter into the love story of Christianity.

Finally, Christmas reveals critical characteristics for what makes a family healthy and fully alive. God is born among us, into a family. This is something we share with Jesus Christ and every single person to ever live. We enter this world and we are a part of a family. Even if our family has immense brokenness and challenges, we belong to a mother and father.

Christmas ought to remind us that families who pray together, stay together. A report from Open Public Health Journal shows that faith affects the health of marriages and the family unit as a whole. “Religious practices (prayer, rituals) also help couples better manage anger and take more responsibility during conflicts.”

We see this in the lives of Mary and Joseph who had no place for the King of Kings to be born but whose trust in God allowed them to trust in each other rather than become bitter about their circumstances. Their faith united them and allowed them to see that God was with them (literally) in their challenges.

A study published by Sutherland Institute reports on the impact of faith on the family as a whole: “Parents who attend church often promote positive outcomes for their children. Religious fathers tend to be more involved with their children, and religiously involved mothers report higher quality parent-child relationships.”

Religious families center the family on a focus bigger than themselves. When we live in the knowledge that we are loved and cared for by God, we become more willing to sacrifice for those that we love the most.

So, this Christmas let us remember that being faithful is not an ambiguous task; it is a relationship that allows us to become fully alive. Celebrating Christmas from the perspective of one’s relationship with God only makes us more willing to see this baby born in Bethlehem in his true identity and be transformed along the way.

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