Relationship lessons from Christmas …

Did you notice how early this year people began decorating their homes for Christmas?

I think it’s because 2020 has been so brutal for so many that people were yearning to bring some more beauty into their lives.

And the holiday season is a beautiful time of year!

With full bellies from Thanksgiving, we now turn our attention to Christmas. There is so much we can learn from this season.

Huh?

Well I’m sure when people think of the holiday season, they don’t think about learning any lessons. Instead, people think of the holidays as a time of great family traditions and cherished memories of time with loved ones. But there really is much we can learn as we dig into the biblical story of Christmas.

To launch us out into the Christmas season, let me share just three relationship lessons we can glean from Christmas …

Go into marriage (or any relationship) with an unwavering commitment to reconciliation. Christmas is all about God’s unwavering commitment to be in relationship with us, and to do what was necessary to reconcile us to Himself since we had broken our relationship with Him with our sin.

Talk about an amazing commitment to reconciliation, God knew before He ever created us that we would break our relationship with Him with sin, and He also planned before creation to make it possible for us to be reconciled to Him through Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 1:9). Christmas is a vivid demonstration of God’s great desire to be in relationship with us.

A lesson we can learn from this is that we, also, should have an unwavering commitment to reconciliation. While we aren’t omniscient like God, we can know that we are imperfect, that every person we’ll ever have a relationship with will be imperfect, and all that imperfection will lead to problems in relationships that will need reconciling. Like God, we should go into our relationships – especially marriage – with an unwavering commitment to reconciliation.

Be patient. Notice God didn’t fix the problem of sin the instant after Adam and Eve committed the first sin in the Garden of Eden. Instead, He used all of human history to unfold His perfect plan of redemption and reconciliation. We see that God will do what brings Him glory and is ultimately best for us at just the right time …

“But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children,” Galatians‬ ‭4:4-5‬.

God was very patient about working out His plan of reconciliation, and we should learn from Him to be patient.

Trust God. Imagine Mary the teenager being told by an angel she was pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit. Such a thing had never occurred before (or since!). But she believed the message.

Imagine Joseph being told that Mary was, indeed, pregnant, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that he should go forward with his plans to marry her. Too incredible to believe? He believed the message.

The angel would visit Joseph again, this time after Jesus was born, to warn him to take the child and flee to Egypt because Herod was looking to kill him.

The Christmas story is full of examples that demonstrate a powerful lesson for us – to trust God.

There are more lessons we can learn from the Christmas story, for our relationships and our lives in general. I’ll stop with these three and encourage you to spend the rest of the month exploring the biblical narrative for yourself.

May God bless you with some wonderful lessons from Christmas!

Scotty