I wonder if some of you may be entirely on your own this Christmas, or maybe far away from home.

I know that for some of you, this particular Christmas may be the most difficult of your life,

perhaps because of special struggles you've been experiencing, or maybe because of the loss

you feel of someone who has been very dear to you.

And friends, the message of the birth of the Lord Jesus is that he's able to be with you

and help you and save you, no matter who you are, where you are, or how you feel.

And he does this precisely because he became one with us.

Apart from sin, right from the beginning of his human life, he came face to face with everything

that we have to face. He felt what we feel. And so today, let's take a moment to think

about him and to listen once again to the story of his birth. Years after the Gospels of Matthew

and Luke had been written with their accounts of Jesus' birth,

the Apostle John sat down to write his Gospel.

No doubt he'd read the other Gospels and could still remember being an eyewitness of the events they described,

and he'd long pondered the meaning of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus.

But I think he also remembered the promise Jesus had given him and the other apostles in the

upper room the evening before his crucifixion.

He told John and the others that the Spirit would come to them, to remind them of everything he had said, to show them

the things that were still to come, and also, interestingly, to lead them into the truth

about Him.

And so John wrote his Gospel so that we might find in that Gospel his understanding of the

truth about Jesus, that the Spirit

of God had revealed to Him, and now He's sharing it with us, the inner meaning, the truth

...