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n his book, A Room Called Remember, Fredrick Buechner tells about the great snowfall in New York City in the winter of 1947. At first it seemed no different from any other snow storm. The flakes gently floated down without any wind to drive them. All day they fell. Gradually the sidewalks, parked cars and buildings were covered with a blanket of white. Streets became slushy. Shopkeepers were out with their shovels trying to keep clear a path to their doors. And the snow kept falling. The plows couldn’t keep ahead of it. Consequently, the traffic nearly came to a standstill. Businesses closed early and people did their best to get home before nightfall.

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By the next morning bustling New York was a totally different city. Abandoned cars were buried. Nothing on wheels could move. Skiers glided gracefully down Park Avenue. The most striking transformation, however, was the silence. The only sounds were muffled voices and the ringing church bells. People listened because they couldn’t help themselves. And our world rarely listens anymore—whether in New York or Toronto, London or Los Angeles, Sydney or Singapore—unless a crisis of sufficient magnitude thrusts a wrench into the wheels of our high-speed, technological society and forces us to a standstill.

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Night falls on Christmas Eve. The
last shop closes. All the hullabaloo
stops—for one brief day.

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Except, perhaps, as Buechner points out, at Christmas time when it’s hard not to stop and listen. Business increases to a frenzied pace. Canned carols blast out over the din of traffic. Bells jingle. Red-robed Santas freeze in Chicago, while their counterparts fry in Melbourne. Then, suddenly, night falls on Christmas Eve. The last shop closes. All the hullabaloo stops. Everything is silent—for one brief day.

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This year don’t miss the silence. Take time to listen. Be still and hear the true message of Christmas which, above all, is a call to remember that God has not forgotten us, but is vitally involved in the affairs of mankind. Two thousand years ago he came to earth in person to save us from our sins.

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So as Christmas rapidly approaches, may I encourage you to pause for just a moment and hear God’s Word: \"The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel—which means, ‘God with us.’\"¹

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And again, \"An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.’\"²

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One of the great tragedies of our time is not that God has forgotten us, but that we have forgotten him.

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On the same day that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian-born Nobel Prize winner, was presented with the Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion by HRH Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace, he addressed many of Britain’s leading political and religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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\"Over half a century ago,\" stated Solzhenitsyn, \"while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this has happened.’\"

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\"And if I were called upon to identify the principal trait of the entire twentieth century,\" Solzhenitsyn continued, \"I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God’.\"

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Besides the onslaught of godless Communism, among some of the other tragic consequences of men forgetting God in this century have been World Wars I and II, followed by the division of Eastern Europe, the Korean, Vietnam, Mid-East, and endless other wars, growing terrorism, and the threat of total annihilation through nuclear warfare.

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The history of the Jewish people, and indeed of all the world, has repeatedly shown that when individuals and nations forget God, they ultimately lead themselves to self-destruction.

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But every year Christmas comes around to call us to remember God and to turn back to him—as individuals—to save us from eternal damnation and—as nations—to save us from self-destruction.

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Another great tragedy of our time is that, instead of recognizing Christmas as God’s call to turn back to him, people look for a vision or an emotional high or something electric as a sign of God’s presence. And they miss him. When Christ came the first time, people didn’t recognize him because he didn’t come the way they expected him to come either. And they missed not only the opportunity of a lifetime but also of an eternity!

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People look for a vision or
an emotional high or something
electric. And they miss him.

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Don’t miss Christ’s call to you this Christmas because you don’t have some experience out of the ordinary. God speaks to us through the ordinary, and commitment to him is a step of faith based on an act of your wil—with or without any feelings or great flashes of insight.

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C. S. Lewis, one of the great thinkers of the past century, was a professor at Cambridge, a well-known author, an outstanding lecturer and, for many years, an atheist. He is a good example of a person who made a calculated, rather than an emotional, commitment to Christ. He said, \"In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.\"

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Christ’s call to commitment is the same today as it has been for the past two thousand years: \"Come to me all of you who are tired from carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.\" ³

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If you believe the true meaning of Christmas—that Jesus is the Son of God who came to earth to die for your sins—and you have never made a commitment of your life to him, or if you sense a need to recommit your life to him, click on the \"God\'s Invitation\" button link below for further help.

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1. Matthew 1:23 (NIV).
2. Matthew 1:20 (NIV).
3. Matthew 11:28.

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