Christmas is a story of hope. Hope in the midst of a terrible situation. The people of Israel were not just surrounded by their enemies, but had been conquered by them. Rome had invaded and now they were captors in their own homes.

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This of course is also symbolic of their true captivity. They were being held captive by their transgressions, their sins. They needed someone to save them. They needed someone to redeem them. And their lives were oriented towards waiting for a messiah. The messiah was someone that had been prophesied about for many thousands of years. Ever since God uttered that first prophetic declaration that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.

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That promise, the promised seed, the promised messiah, that would come and crush the serpent’s head had been a couple of thousand years in the making. This promise seemed slow, but we know that it was sure. The people of Israel waited.

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Waiting is a prerequisite for hope. In other words, you can’t have hope unless you also have a time of waiting. You can’t have hope for something you aren’t waiting for. You can’t have hope for something you already have. Hope is only put in things you don’t yet have. Things that you are eagerly waiting for. It’s waiting with a purpose.

Christmas tells us the story of waiting with a purpose. The promised messiah is coming and our hope is in him. What is it about him that we are hoping for? The same thing that the Israelites hoped for…redemption. We are waiting to be redeemed by our savior.

The story of Christmas offers us unbelievable hope. Hope that we can be redeemed through Jesus. Now, you might be saying, I thought the cross was that hope, how is Christmas that hope? To that, I say, without Christmas, we don’t have a cross. Without the birth of Christ, we can’t possibly have the death and resurrection of the Christ. God becoming flesh was the first step in redemption. It was the opening act if you will. And the final act doesn’t come until the very end when even our earthly bodies will be redeemed.

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Christmas gives us hope for redemption because it tells us that God sent his son on a rescue mission. It tells us that God saw us in our despair and in our need and decided to do something about it. He didn’t leave us in our sins, in our iniquities, he sent forth his son! And he came as a baby and they called him Emmanuel, God with us.