The Way Up: Son Down to Son Up
December 20, 2020
Have you ever thought about the fact that any religion, any spiritual belief that talks about any heaven or hell always talks about heaven being “up” and hell being “down.” You find it all over the Bible. For example, Psalm 14:2 says, “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind...” You see, Christmas is really just the beginning of a round trip that Jesus took from heaven down to earth and then took back up to heaven. In the second chapter of a letter that Paul wrote called Philippians, Paul describes this round trip. He tells us in this passage that if we do three things, we too can take the way up to heaven.
Topics: Eternal Life
In this series
A Way in a Manger
Christmas is not just an event that happened in the past. It is an experience that we live in the present an and expectation that we have for the future. We all deal with our past, our present and our future. None of us have a perfect past. There are times when the skeletons in the closet rattle and we hear them at night - past regrets, past failures, things we all wish we could do over. We all live with troubles in the present, anxiety, worry, problems, disabilities, depression, discouragement. The older you get the more the future looms bigger and bigger - trips to the hospital, uncertain diagnosis, and of course the realization that one day the present will end, and we will all be in the future. We all wonder in a way when will it happen? How will it happen? What happens after it happens? Maybe this is why we all love Christmas so much, because, Christmas is about a God who can heal our hurts in the past, is our help in the present, and gives us hope for the future. The way he does that is found in a manger. When we really understand what happened at the first Christmas, when we really understand who was born, why he came and what he did, we realize we don’t have to fight the past. We can face anything in the present and we don’t have to fear the future.
