We are well into the season of Advent. Already we're preparing once again to celebrate the first coming of our King in humility, and we are directing our attention ahead to when he will come again in glory as the almighty King of kings. Naturally, God's people view this season as a time of spiritual preparation—with heartfelt repentance for our sins and with joyful anticipation of commemorating the birth of Jesus.

As we look forward to our celebration of Christmas Day, it's easy to recognize that we will not celebrate this event in the way that the world around us celebrates it. Our Christmas will be different. Our holiday is a holy day.

For a long time, faithful Christians have watched with some dismay as the world around them has taken this holy day and blessed event and changed it into something very unholy and secular. We see the season of our Savior's birth transform into a season of marketing, frenzied shopping, and materialism. We watch holiday gatherings and office parties become opportunities to overindulge in food, alcohol, and boorish behavior. We see little children measure the meaning of their Christmas celebration by how many items on their Christmas wish list appeared under the tree—with all too many sincerely believing that those gifts were left there by a chubby man in a red suit. We hear the annual debates about what kind of Christmas displays are permissible on public property—or whether they can even be called Christmas displays. Even the greetings of the season have been sanitized and cleansed of references to the one whose birth we celebrate; "Happy holidays" and "Season's greetings" are mouthed joylessly by store clerks and printed on greeting cards.

We tend to look at all of these distortions of the true celebration of Christmas with some sadness and even some resentment. But I think there may be a different way to look at it.

Isn't it interesting: This is a world that rejects Jesus as the Savior. It's a world that has no intention or desire to acknowledge the true meaning of his birth. It's a world that wants to find joy and pleasure in anything and everything but the Savior himself. Yet, in spite of itself, that world can't help making the celebration of Christmas the high point of the annual calendar. Even with all of Satan's attempts to direct people's attention away from this Savior and his entrance into the world, unbelievers can't help making this season a season of celebration. To be sure, they don't celebrate Christ, but even their misguided celebration is unwittingly and unintentionally connected to the birth of Jesus two thousand years ago. Consciously and unconsciously, they try to take the Christ out of Christmas. But even in their Christ-less celebrating, they unknowingly point to the event in Bethlehem that changed the world.