Think you know the Christmas story? Here are five misconceptions
Michael Kruger talks through five commonly believed, but ultimately untrue, features of the Christmas story. How many did you know?
The greatest joy is Jesus
This time of year we are thinking about the coming of Jesus into the world. This one looks forward to why that is good news and where our joy should be focused.
Does God owe us something better?
‘You see, there’s a deep sense in us because of indwelling sin, that the God of the heavens, the Creator of the universe, the Saviour of the world, is actually our personal genie. And if we pull the handle, or rub the side of the bottle, the genie is there to do our bidding. We can sign off on every creed and all of the right confessions, but if we are angry when God does not come through for us because we have done the right thing by him, then we are operating in a prosperity-gospel-lite zone.’
The real meaning of Christmas
‘Events like the Christmas Truce are worth celebrating. But they lack something. They lack permanence. Such impermanent peace is what we often find in our quest for the real meaning of Christmas. If we are looking for permanent and ultimate goodwill, love, and peace, we must look beyond our gift-giving, get-togethers, and office parties. We must look to no other place than to a manger.’
Christmas should humble us
‘A baby who was the High King of Heaven. In a feeding trough. It’s a shocking picture, really, when you think about the humility of Christ. To step down from the literal throne of Heaven itself, take on our humanity, and enter our world as an infant born into poverty among an oppressed people is hands down the most extreme display of humility in all of history.’
The brown migrant boy in the manger
Does remembering both Jesus’ ethnicity and his early years as a migrant change how we tell or understand the Christmas story?
From the archive: 10 things depression is not
‘I have something of a hypochondriac streak in me. I don’t go to doctors every week to try and get diagnoses for entirely imagined illnesses or anything like that. But I do recognise my tendency to hear about different illnesses and afflictions and immediately, for some stupid reason, begin to fear I may have it. I suddenly find every itch or freckle is some serious, malignant problem even though there is next to no possibility I could possibly have the illness. Watch enough news reports about it and, though there is clearly no grounds on which I could possibly have it, I can convince myself I might have ebola. To avoid that sort of extremely unhelpful hypochondria, here is a list of 10 things that depression (of itself) is not.’