Two years ago, my roommates at BYU decided that we should draw names for Christmas and have a sort of roommate Christmas before we went our separate ways for the Holidays. We’d all been living together for a couple years, so we knew each other pretty well by then. So we all put a lot of thought into finding the perfect gift for the roommate we were shopping for.
On the night finals ended, we had our little present-opening party. My roommate Jeff Dance had my name, and he got exactly the right present for me. When I opened his present, this is what I found … this picture of Christ and Peter. Such a nice present to receive. I thanked Jeff again and again. Later that night, after Jeff came back from dropping off his soon-to-be fiancée, we were talking about this picture.
Jeff was telling that he had been walking through the bookstore a few weeks earlier when he saw the picture and just knew he had to get it for me.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, What do you see when you look at it?” Jeff asked me.
“I see Christ lifting me out of the water.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d see,” he said.
I think we’ve all had times when we felt like we were drowning emotionally and spiritually. I know have. I’ve certainly had my times when I felt overwhelmed, lonely, or even hopeless. I’ve certainly had times when I felt my sins were too great to be forgiven. Times when I felt I didn’t have a way out.
I’ve learned from such experiences that Christ is always my way out. I may be falling under the water, far away from the security of the boat. But Christ has always been there for me, even when my life has strayed from him.
I like two scriptures found in second Nephi, one at the start of the Isaiah chapters, the other at the end. In the first, Christ asks us this question: “O house of Israel, is my hand shortened at all that it cannot redeem or have I no power to deliver?” (2 Nephi 7:2) Then, after dedicating chapter after chapter to the woes of the last days, Christ then answers the question with this statement: “Notwithstanding, mine arm is lengthened out all day long.” Christ’s arm is not shortened. He can redeem. He can comfort. Cast your sins on Him, and He will bear them. Cast your burdens on Him, and He will bear them. The more I experience, the more episodic setbacks I experience, the more convinced I become of Christ’s divinity. The more I learn, the more I know that when I can’t cope, Jesus offers hope.
There are two things we must each know about Christ: (1) He is our Atoner, and (2) He is our Friend. In the first role, He liberates us from sin. In the second, He is there for us when needed. In each role is His arm lengthened. And in each role, He does have the power to deliver.
And that, more than anything, is the Reason for the Season. When we celebrate Christmas, we aren’t celebrating just a birth—We are celebrating the life, ministry, and Great Sacrifice of our Christ. We are celebrating His acceptance of His role in the plan of salvation. The rest of us came to Earth to prove ourselves; He came to redeem.
In between Gethsemane and the Cross, Christ stood before Pilate, a Roman Leader who would decide whether to crucify Jesus. Jesus begged not for his life. Rather, he simply said, “To this end was I born and for this cause came I into the world” (John 18:37). He came to redeem, and no Roman leader or any man would interfere with Christ fulfilling the awful requirements of being our Redeemer.
He was fulfilling a promise made long ago to our Father in Heaven and to each of us. There, we were standing in that Grand Council, and when we heard the Father’s plan, we shouted for joy. The role of Atoner was the central part of that plan; No man would come unto the Father but by Him; He would be the one who set the way; therefore, we had to—had to—pick the right person for the job. I’m sure it didn’t take anyone long to figure out who it would be; who it had to be—for there was only one of us who could do it.
Can you imagine the joy you must have felt, sitting in that Grand Council, when Christ arose, and meekly said, “Here Am I. Send me!”
And with the Savior in place, the plan began to be put into effect. Christ came and organized our Earth. He was the God of the Old Testament. And then, in a stable, He came … He came to fulfill his greatest responsibility that of Atoner. And, in that way, Christmas is a promise kept.
For 33 years, the Creator of this Earth dwelt on this Earth. For 33 years, he lived a spotless life, keeping Himself qualified to be our Savior. 33 years of sinless living. That’s incredible. I doubt I could live a spotless life for 33 minutes, if my life depended on it. And he lived a virtuous life for 33 years, and my life did depend on it.
For three years, He ministered. In those three years, He gave us the wonderful teachings found in the Gospels, and set his life as an example to all those would follow. He established His church and organized its priesthood.
But his greatest work came in Gethsemane and on the Cross.
One LDS scholar put it this way:
“Human nature makes us want to quantify, to measure the atonement of Christ, but his ordeal is off any scale; it is beyond our comprehension. Jesus bore not just the sins of the world, but the sorrow, pains, and sicknesses of the world.
“All the negative aspects of human existence brought about by the Fall, Jesus Christ absorbed into himself. He experienced vicariously in Gethsemane all the private griefs and heartaches, all the physical pains and handicaps, all the emotional burdens and depressions of the human family. He knows the loneliness of those who don’t fit in or who aren’t handsome or pretty. He knows what it’s like to choose up teams and be the last one chosen. He knows the anguish of parents who children go wrong … He knows all these things personally and intimately because He lived them in the Gethsemane experience. Having personally lived a perfect life, he then chose to experience our imperfect lives. In that infinite Gethsemane experience, the meridian of time, the center of eternity, he lived a billion billion lifetimes of pain, disease and sorrow.
“God uses no magic wand to simply wave bad things into nonexistence. The sins that he remits, he remits by making them his own and suffering them. The pain and heartaches that he relieves, he relieves by suffering them himself. Those things can be shared and absorbed, but they cannot be simply washed or wished away. They must be suffered. Thus we owe him not only for our spiritual cleansing from sin, but for our physical, mental and emotional healings as well, for he has borne these infirmities for us also. All that the Fall put wrong, the Savior in his atonement puts right. It is all part of his infinite sacrifice—of his infinite gift” (Stephen E. Robinson).
All of that was experienced by Christ for you. For me. For all of us. Indeed, the Son of Man hath descended below them all. Can we hear such a description of Christ’s Atonement and doubt that He loves us? We know he does. He has proven it. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). No description can come close to quantifying the awfulness of that night—the dreadful sufferings Christ had to make on our behalf. But we can see that in order to make an infinite atonement, Christ’s love for us also had to be infinite.
Can you read about Christ, can you study his life, can you study Gethsemane and the Cross and not come away with the knowledge that He loves you. And can you not also see that those experiences did indeed qualify him to be both your Redeemer and your Friend?
The more you study and learn of Christ, the more you will want to celebrate Christ. And that, my Friends, is the reason for this season. President Ezra Taft Benson once said: “Without Christ there would be no Christmas, and without Christ there can be no fulness of joy.” President Hinckley elaborated on that, when he said, “We honor His birth. But without His death that birth would have been but one more birth. It was the redemption which He worked out in the Garden of Gethsemane and upon the cross of Calvary which made His gift immortal, universal, and everlasting.”
President Hinckley said: “This is the wondrous and true story of Christmas. The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem of Judea is preface. The three-year ministry of the Master is prologue. The magnificent substance of the story is His sacrifice, the totally selfless act of dying in pain on the cross of Calvary to atone for the sins of all of us. The epilogue is the miracle of the Resurrection, bringing
the assurance that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”
Indeed, the story of Christ did not end on the cross; it, like He, lives on. He was resurrected, breaking the bands of death and bestowing immortality upon mankind. “There would be no Christmas if there had not been Easter,” President Hinckley once said. Christ’s story goes beyond Easter; its storyline goes to the Americas where he visited after His resurrection; it goes to a grove in New York where He, along with the Father, appeared to Joseph Smith, to restore His church to the Earth. His story is best experienced within the hearts of His followers, who reverence His name, rejoice over His life and seek to wash their garments clean in the blood of the Lamb. And His story will yet take us to the Second Coming, when all knees shall bow before Him. O what it would be, to greet that day with gladness, having been washed clean of our sins through Him.
So you can see the merits of His life, the Greatest Life ever lived. And you can see what great cause we all have to celebrate Him, to emulate Him, and to become like Him. And we can see the Greatest Gift we’ll ever get was given to us 2,000 years ago.
As you dash about this Christmas season, take some time to reflect on the Reason. Take some time to think about Jesus and all He has done for you. Think about His matchless Gift. Think about how indebted you are to him. And perhaps before you crowd into the mall and stand in long lines, put Christ on the top of your Christmas gift list. Elder John A. Widtsoe, a member of the Quorum of Twelve five decades ago, once taught: “Our first gift at Christmas should be to the Lord.”
Elder Widtsoe then explained how to give Christ a Christmas gift: “Every kind word to our own, every help given them, is as a gift to God, whose chief concern is the welfare of his children. Every gentle deed to our neighbor, every kindness to the poor and suffering, is a gift to the Lord, before whom all mankind are equal. Every conformity to the Lord’s plan of salvation—and this is of first importance—is a direct gift to God, for thereby we fit ourselves more nearly for our divinely planned destiny.”
Christ once explained who His friends are. “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:14). The best way to be His Friend is to be like Him. In that way, you will lose your life for His sake, as you help others, just as he did.
President David O. McKay explained how aiding others is the spirit of Christmas, when he said: “True happiness comes only by making others happy—the practical application of the Savior’s doctrine of losing one’s life to gain it. In short, the Christmas spirit is the Christ spirit, that makes our hearts glow in brotherly love and friendship and prompts us to kind deeds of service. It is the spirit of the gospel of Jesus Christ, obedience to which will bring ‘peace on earth,’ because it means—good will toward all men.”
Most of all, as you serve like Christ did, as you try to live as Christ did, you qualify yourself to be a recipient of every blessing of His atonement, so that His sacrifice for you is not wasted. Indeed, you qualify for eternal life.
And, finally, Elder Widtsoe explained how that kind of living is the perfect gift for your Redeemer this Holiday season, as he taught: “The desire and the effort to give to the Lord, born of the surrender of man to the plan of salvation, stamp every Christmas gift with genuine value. They who identify themselves with the plan, who do not resist it, who earnestly seek to tread the path of the plan, are true givers to the Lord, and their gifts to men come with the flavor of heaven. The Lord and his plan must have place in our Christmas celebration.”
I want you to know that I know Christ did volunteer to be our Savior. He did come to Earth. He did live the perfect life. He did perform the atonement on our behalf in the Garden and on the Cross. In doing so, He blazed our trail back to our Father in Heaven. And if we will follow in his path, we will, like Him, return to live with our Father. He lives. And because He lives, so we will also live beyond this life. He did appear to Joseph Smith. He did restore His church and His priesthood through the Prophet Joseph. He continues to guide His church today through His prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley. I know all of that to be true. Most of all, I know this to be true: Christ loves us. Every one of us. He will take upon Him your burdens and your sins, as He has mine. His arm is not shortened; he can redeem; he can comfort. When you feel yourself sinking, when you feel you’ve lost hope, when you feel you’ve lost your way, there you will see, like Peter saw that day on the sea, your Savior looking down at you, extending his arm to pull you out. Please draw near unto Him. Your life, both now and eternally, will be blessed because of it. And this I say humbly in His Holy name, Jesus Christ. Amen.
