Welcome to the Christmas Day edition of Things Unseen. I did wonder if anyone would be listening today, but I wonder

if some of our podcast community may actually be entirely on their own today or far away

from home. And I know that for some of us this

particular Christmas day may be the most difficult Christmas day of our lives,

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

the loss we feel of someone who has been very dear to us.

And friends, the message of Christmas Day of the birth of the Lord Jesus is

that he's able to be with us and to help us and to save us no matter who we are where we are or how we 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 aged apostle John sat down to write his gospel.

No doubt he had 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 the 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 he's now sharing it with us

the inner meaning the truth about the coming of Jesus into the world.

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