Dr Paul Allen

It might happen when you hear your parents’ favorite Christmas carol . Immediately the song transports you out of your sterile workday back to your childhood, to a living room bursting with tinsel, gifts, and anticipation. Or maybe it happens when you smell the spices of cider moving through your house this Christmas and you half-expect the memory of your grandfather to be standing in your kitchen, bragging about his  perfect  recipe, through his playful grin. Worship with All Five Senses Of course, the memories aren’t always that idyllic. For some, they’re unwelcome intrusions into a life under construction. Good or bad, sweet or bitter, the memories still come each Christmas. Just one small trigger, and everything we’ve loved, lost, and treasured seems to swell up in our hearts. Nostalgia arrives through our senses. What we hear, see, taste, touch, and smell is the ink we use to write our mental autobiographies. We cannot escape our memories, because we cannot escape o

Christmas is almost here. It’s a time to celebrate what God did. He brought everything together to do what we could not. He brought salvation to ill-deserving humanity in the Person and finished work of Jesus Christ. Like a perfect conductor, God orchestrated all things for the arrival of heaven’s King. That night, some 2000 years ago, God pulled off a jaw-dropping display of sovereignty. He demonstrated himself the hero as he conducted his plan that he made before creation for the arrival of the God-man. The arrival of the long-ago-promised, long-awaited-Messiah was a stunning demonstration of God’s sovereign grace towards sinful humanity. Despite the obstacles of humanity’s sin and contrary historical events, God was moved by his own mercy to sovereignly orchestrate history in order to bring us the Christmas Gift; the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Consider the majesty of God in his heroic demonstration of sovereignty in bringing us the Person of salvation: God orches

Secular society is especially adept at making Christmas into something that it is not. From a non-Christian perspective, the “holiday season” is not about Christ at all. It’s about commercialism. It’s about shopping, gifts, traditions, food, and seasonal music. It’s about a jolly, overweight, bearded man from the north pole who dons faux red fur and sets off, with a big bag of toys, into the cold December night, seated in a flying sleigh pulled by magic caribou. But for us, as believers, Christmas is something infinitely more wonderful than any store discount or fairy tale. Christmas is the celebration of something priceless, something historical, something miraculous, something salvific. It is the day when we remember the birth of our Savior — the fact that the eternal second Member of the Trinity took on flesh and dwelt among us. This is the season when we remember that the Son of God became a man — which is why He is called Immanuel, which means “God with Us.” As Isaiah prophes