By B. Clayton Bell
Robert Fulton heard only words of discouragement from the crowd as they watched him work on his steamboat. They called it "Fulton's Folly," yet steamboats ended up sailing the seven seas. Madame Curie sorted through tons and tons of waste material in search of radium. The common man laughingly asked, "What is radium?" It ended up being one of the major contributions to medical science.
My friends, there is something terribly perverse about human nature. It is still true today in scientific, cultural and social areas, and especially true in the spiritual realm that those who make progress walk alone. The biblical judgment is still true that human beings love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. For that reason, democracy is a better form of government than communism for it has a better system of checks and balances against the evil resident in every human heart. But checks and balances will work only if the moral orientation of the majority is in line with the truth we have been given by God in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, democracy can become nothing more than a tyranny of peer pressure.
So, my friends, Christmas is a string around our finger to remind us that truth and morality are not arrived at by popular vote, but only through the gracious self-disclosure that God has given us when the Word became flesh and lived here. Jesus is born! Because He was born we know that the universe is personal, not mechanistic. Because Jesus was born we know that the unchanging God stands above and behind the changing history of our world. Because Jesus was born we have a moral compass through the immoral wasteland of modern life. And because Jesus Christ was born and crucified, the way of Jesus is traveled only by a minority; but it is those who dare to follow Him and who dare to listen to Him and live life His way, it is to them that He shows himself on Easter Sunday.
What a marvelous, marvelous gift God has given us. But let us not think just of a birthday. Let us remember what his birthday means. It is a string around our finger to remind us of something terribly, terribly important.