Here's Nancy Lee-Demause helping us understand what was really happening during the first Christmas.

Darkness was being turned to light. Death was being turned to life. Despair was being turned to hope.

After 400 years of silence, God spoke.

The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.

That's something to leap for joy about.

This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for Wednesday, December 17th, 2014.

A lot of Revive Our Hearts listeners have been enjoying Come Adore, Nancy's new piano CD this Christmas season. I'm Music is an important part of our celebration, and this isn't a recent tradition.

Songs were part of the very first Christmas, and those songs have a lot to teach us today. Here's Nancy to tell us more as she begins a series called Songs of the First Christmas. One of the great things about

being a child of God is that you have something to sing about. Christians should love to sing.

And in the Gospel of Luke, we find the very first

New Testament songs and hymns. Now, there are many songs in the Old Testament, but as we come

into the New Testament, there's a different message or a fulfillment of the Old Testament message

that takes place as Christ comes into the world. And actually, the first songs or hymns of the New Testament are Christmas songs.

Now, they're not songs that necessarily we hear sung at Christmas, but they really are

the songs of the first Christmas.

And unlike so many of our modern-day contemporary songs, these songs are not self-centered,

they're God-centered. They're Christ-centered. There's songs that talk not about what does this do

for me, but what does this reveal about the greatness, the glory, the goodness of God?

There's songs about the redemptive plan and purposes of God. It's interesting that Luke's

gospel is the one that records these songs, these hymns, these poems. The other gospels don't have

any of them, but the gospel of Luke has six. And if we thought about it, I bet you could remember

what most of those are. Remember the first one was Elizabeth's song in Luke chapter 1.

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