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Our View of Christ as Christmastime"And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins." Matthew 1:21IntroductionWhat Jesus is to you at Christmastime is what He will be to you through all eternity. It is what He will be in this life. How we depend on Christ is how we will depend upon Him in eternity. Christmastime has two main assaults against Jesus as our Lord and Saviour in the secularized country that we live in.The first attempt is to silence the message of Christmas under the banner of religious diversity. The feeling is if you are not a Christian, that although it is celebrating the birthday of Christ, Jesus cannot have center stage. It is a temporary problem because one day He will have complete dominion over everything (Phil. 2:10-11).So why bother with trying to accommodate every religion? Let us wipe out any religious significance that Christmas has, people, say, so we do not have any mention of Christ? There are plenty of substitutes. Retailers are thankful for the season. They do not want to admit it's all because of Christ's birth that makes it all possible.The second and more lethal assault is to remake Christ into the image we want Him to be, so Christ is not really Saviour, but a world leader and example, a great teacher. Many want to keep Him as a little baby so He will not be a threat to anyone.Main Thought of ScriptureYou cannot ignore the impact Jesus has had on the world and neither can you change what He came to do, for He came on a mission from God. By-products may be His great teaching, His example, and His place as a world leader. But the most correct description of what He came to do was to be Saviour (I Tim. 1:15). He came to save us from our sin. We cannot defeat the damning effect of sin on our lives. We have to be rescued from it. We can only be saved by accepting Christ's payment for our sin by His death in our place on the cross.When John sees Jesus in heaven, as recorded in the book of Revelation, he sees Jesus as a lamb slain, and He is proclaimed as one who redeems us by His blood. That is the utmost in how we should view Christ, not only at Christmas but throughout all eternity. Christ's death for us and our trust in Him as Saviour, is the reason Jesus came to earth.ApplicationJesus is either your Saviour or He is not your Saviour. If He is not your Saviour, you have not only missed the true meaning of Christmas, you have missed heaven and the only means of salvation. God has provided for you to make it there. We must not keep silent about Jesus as Saviour.AdmonitionWe must maintain the Christmas message and the total absence of it from the truth. The song says, "What would you do with Jesus neutral? You cannot be. One day your heart will be asking, what will He do with me?"---Dan Nelson