Christmas challenges us to examine how far we’ll go to reconcile a broken relationship …

There’s not a person alive, or who has ever lived, who hasn’t faced the unpleasant experience of a broken relationship.

How we respond to a relationship that has failed, or is failing, varies widely.

Some people can’t stand the idea of a relationship of any kind “going wrong” and are willing to expend a great deal of effort to fix any problems.

A lot of other people are just too stubborn to admit any failings on their part in order to do the work of reconciliation and will let a relationship fail before admitting any culpability.

We are stubborn people! Ed Vasicek provides an example:

“A customer walked into my clothing shop and asked to see the pants that were advertised in the paper that day. ‘We don’t have an ad in the paper today,’ I told her. She insisted I was wrong, so I got a copy of the paper, and we went through it, eventually landing on an ad for pants from another local store. Exasperated, the customer glared at me and said, ‘In my newspaper, the ad was for this store!'”

You can’t find your way to reconciliation when you’re unwilling to admit your own failings in a relationship.

Others stubbornly assert, “I won’t change for anyone!”

Which makes the Christmas story all the more amazing!

That’s because Christmas is a vivid display of how far God is willing to go in order to reconcile people who have broken their relationships with Him.

I phrase it that way because regarding the relationship of every human being with God, the “wrong” done (in our case, the sin committed) was always 100 percent on our side; there was never any wrong-doing or failure in the relationship on God’s part.

Yet, it is God who drafts the perfect plan of reconciliation, and offers up His own Son to make reconciliation with Him possible. God has done all the work!

And regarding the issue of change, Jesus Christ had always existed (e.g. John 1:1, “In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God”) … but not as a human being. He humbled Himself by being born as a human in order to carry out God’s mission of reconciliation:

“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.

“And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation,” 2 Corinthians 5:18-19.

Take some time this Christmas to meditate on the astounding effort God employed in order to reconcile you to Him. Let that be part of your joy this holiday season.

Scotty