One of the best parts about this time of year is that this is the one time during the year when we get to hear and sing along to all of our beloved Christmas carols. Good Christian hymn writers have a way of taking deep, complicated, spiritual truth and encapsulating it. Then when you put those truths to beautiful music and sing it over and over again, it gets that truth deep down into your soul. I love the way many of the carols we sing this time of year bring out all the many different aspects of the joy and wonder of the incarnation of the Son of God. One of my favorite lines in any of the Christmas carols we sing is the first verse of “O Holy Night.”
We sing, “Long lay the world in sin and error pining…” It’s a reminder of the reality that ever since mankind rebelled against God in Genesis 3, our relationship with God has been broken because of our sin. As a symptom of our broken relationship with God, the whole creation which was perfect when God made it also became broken. The Bible didn’t need to tell us that the world we live in is broken. We see and feel the brokenness and pain regularly. We all were born into a world in which all the good we experience in life is mixed with more than enough sorrow and frustration. We all were born into a world in which most of us will far more times than we wish have to struggle through the grief of losing a loved one and in which we know the whole time that our own death is inevitable. Life leaves us pining for something better, something more. Pining means suffering with a longing in our hearts for something we know we desperately need but don’t have. We don’t always recognize it, but we all intuitively spend all of our lives pining for the life God originally intended for us to enjoy lived in relationship with Him.
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