Christmas or Christ's Mass?

CHRIST’s Mass

Why do we celebrate Chris mass? It was originally Christ’s Mass, the celebration of the birth of the savior of the world. Why are we called Chris tians? We are imitators of Christ and were first called Christ ians at Antioch.

Somewhere in the languages of the western cultures we have morphed Christ into Chris without any care that we are mispronouncing Jesus’ title, The Christ! We never call Jesus the Chris!

Now everyone in the world understands that our pronunciation of Chris tian has the same meaning as Christ ian and everyone is used to this pronunciation and I doubt most Christ ians care.

Does it hurt Jesus’ feelings that we mispronounce His title? I don’t know, He never told me it did or did not; but I have thought about this a lot over the last 2 decades.

And what is it that we celebrate at Christmas time? Christ ians celebrate the birth of the savior of humanity as a human baby through His birth to a virgin woman. We celebrate His miraculous conception by GOD’s Holy Spirit and His life of overcoming sin and temptation as a human man. We celebrate that He obediently went to the cross; having been whipped nearly to death; shed His blood and died in our place so that we are delivered from the power of sin and temptation, healed in our spirit, soul and body and redeemed to our Heavenly Father as His Children, joint heirs with Jesus of the Eternal Kingdom of GOD.

But, I have seldom heard it stated that we are celebrating the promise of GOD for humanity kept. The promise that GOD made before He created the earth or humanity; if you have been a follower of Christ for very long you should know the scripture that says, “…the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

Yes, GOD promised to redeem us to Himself before He even created humanity; before He even created everything in the natural realm in which we exist. This is one of the things that we need to be celebrating and not just at this time of year!

Everything that we need to know and understand about GOD is that when we were just a concept of His desire, He already knew that we would need to be redeemed and restored to His original desire for us. So He promised to do that by determining to be born as a human man but not of the human male bloodline, Jesus would be born of GOD by a virgin. Then as the Son of GOD/Son of Man He would do everything that the Father told Him to do and say everything that the Father told Him to say and to yield His will to the Father’s will.

GOD’s promise to humanity was that no matter how far humanity strayed from GOD in our relationship and obedience He would redeem back to Himself all who were willing to give up their natural life for His eternal life by believing in and living for Jesus the Christ.