Happy Christmas! Why did Jesus come to the earth? According to Paul, he came to set us free from suffering the consequences of the law. In the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians, he says: “Someone is justified not by obeying the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. We believed in Christ Jesus so that we could be justified by faith in Christ, and not by obeying the law, because nobody will be justified by obeying the law.”
Bizarrely, the problem that many people have with Christianity – that it is a set of rules that restricts what people can do – is the very problem that Jesus came to solve. Jesus came not to bring new rules, but to set us free from the heavy burden that the old rules were placing on us. Getting right with God is no longer a matter of obeying the rules; it is now simply a matter of accepting the Christmas gift of grace, the free pardon for our sins offered through faith in Jesus.
So the Christmas message is a message of freedom: freedom from the consequences of our sins; freedom from slavery to addictions; freedom from living wasted and purposeless lives; freedom from the burden of trusting no-one but ourselves; freedom from irrelevance and insignificance; freedom from hatred and bitterness; freedom from servitude to money, power, self-indulgence and fame; freedom from the curse of death.