So here’s the greatest cause for Christmas joy—not that you deck your house with hundreds of lights or fill your home with dozens of gifts—but that the Lord of heaven and earth entered into the commonness of our lives to be our Saviour from sin and self-absorption.

He’s the reason why at every Christmas a song rises from millions of redeemed men and women to mingle with the anthem of those long-ago angels—a hymn of gratitude and grace.

We discover that life can be something better than a mean little existence between the cradle and the grave. We learn that our day-to-day experience can be full of joy and possibilities, of hope and healing. The glow that began in the midnight fields near Bethlehem has become a radiance none can extinguish: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:4).

The gift given us in Jesus is why we search each Christmas for the words of that angel hymn: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward all.”

Gratitude is just another way of saying “Thanks” for grace.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott