Pastor’s Note: The following excerpt was taken from an introduction to a Christmas message given by Dr. Chevis Horne, a beloved pastor for over thirty-two years. He was considered by many to be a gentle, earnest, sincere man, unassuming and unpretentious. He was a pastor at the First Baptist Church of Martinsville, Virginia and for a while he taught at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake, Forest Carolina. Anyone who has had the pleasure of sharing in the benefit of his teaching, doesn’t soon forget it.
My prayer is that this brief excerpt from a theme on Christmas will be a blessing during this Advent Season. While many of us wait expectantly for Christ’s second coming, it is always advantageous to consider and meditate on His first arrival!
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Christmas touches our hearts, inspires our imaginations, and stirs the deepest and most creative springs within us. In its celebration, we fashion and paint our best art, write our best music, use our most decorative skills, and tell our best stories. Our finest images, touched with feeling, are those that Christmas gives us.
God made a strange, new entrance into our world at this season. Christmas is the time of incarnation when God took upon Himself our frail and fragile form. He came among us in flesh, our kind of flesh—flesh that grew tired and needed rest, flesh that needed food and drink, flesh that became depressed and was tempted, flesh that would die. Because of the incarnation God looked out upon dawns and sunsets through human eyes, listened to melodies through human ears, felt human pain and human joy, knew the agony of loneliness and the pain of death. When we could not go to God, He came to us. He made Himself little, the way we are. He spoke our language and walked in all our dusty ways.
The coming of Jesus at Christmas was like the breaking of morning. Matthew tells us that “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death Light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16). John will not let us forget that “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4–5 NIV). John was probably writing one hundred years after that great event. We stand almost two thousand years after it, and that light is still shining. The darkness has not put it out and never will. There is not enough darkness in the entire universe to put out that light.
Light is one of the main motifs of Christmas and has been from the beginning. A star would guide the wise men and stand over where the child was. He would be a child with the light of a star in His face.
Christmas is like a North Star in our frame of reference. No matter how far the winds blow us and the tides drift us, the star is still there to call us back. We never date a letter, sign a legal document, or celebrate a birthday without doing it in reference to that far-off event.
Christmas is the watershed of time. There history is cleaved. One stream flows backward into B.C., the other flows forward into A.D. Our times are washed by that stream that flows forward into the future.
Christmas is the time and place where God pulls back the curtain so we can see His face. There His supreme revelation begins. We are a little surprised. We would have thought the great God of our universe would have been more dramatic and spectacular. We would have expected Him to rend the sky and jar earth with a mighty cosmic voice. But He didn’t. He came in something as weak and helpless as a baby who may have whimpered through that first night. But it is here that we learn that God so loved us and our world that He gave us His only begotten Son. In that baby we see the wonderful love and grace of God. In that event a Savior has been born who is Christ the Lord. That is the time of our salvation. 1
Chevis F. Horne
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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