RAFT Anglican Church – Going Christmas Crackers

8-Dec-2024 | By Hilton Jordan

It always amuses me that bon-bons, or Christmas crackers, continue to be part of most peoples’ Christmas celebrations.

A pack of tiny playing cards, a lightweight keyring, a plastic-sheet fish toy, miniature skittles – when have you ever used any of these?

Christmas crackers generally look great on the outside, and open with a bang, but tend to leave you disappointed or underwhelmed.

Christmas crackers remind me of why the events of the first Christmas took place.

You see, we’re a lot like Christmas crackers ourselves.

We can give a good first impression, and we can generally present ourselves well in public, but our loved ones know what we are really like … and that is not always a pretty picture.

The truth of the matter is, we even disappoint ourselves when we fail to live up to our own expectations of kindness, love, or goodness.

It is this very lack of kindness, love, or goodness which means that we also fall short of God’s expectations of us.

This falling short puts each one of us on the wrong side of God; meaning that we deserve God’s justice.

But God loves us.

God loves us so much that he provided a solution to our problem on the first Christmas: his own Son.

God sent his Son into the world in the baby boy born in Bethlehem, Israel, just over two thousand years ago, called Jesus or Christ.

Jesus Christ lived a perfect life of kindness, love, and goodness; then he willingly took the justice of God, that we deserve, on himself when he died on a Roman cross.

Because Jesus took our place, you and I can have the greatest Christmas gift.

Because Jesus took our place, we can have God’s forgiveness, eternal life with God, and begin – with God’s help – to live a life of growing kindness, love, and goodness.

So this Christmas, if you happen to pull open a Christmas cracker, know that – although we’re a lot like Christmas crackers – God has remedied our problem in the gift of his Son, Jesus.

If you would be interested in finding out more about God’s gift to us, please feel free to join us for one of our Christmas services.

Our 2024 Christmas service times will be: