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Podcast: On Christmas: The Best of ‘The Crossway Podcast’

December 22, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Importance, Beauty, and Hope of Christmas

This podcast looks back through the years of The Crossway Podcast at some of the best insights from our guests about the importance, beauty, and hope of Christmas. Guests include Keith and Kristyn Getty,  Andreas Köstenberger, Matthew Emerson and Brandon Smith, Benjamin Gladd, Nancy Guthrie, and Jonathan Gibson. They cover a range of topics from grief during the holidays, the Trinity in the incarnation, and significance of Christmas hymns.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:42 - The Gettys’ Favorite Christmas Hymns

Welcome to another episode of The Crossway Podcast. I'm Matt Tully, and today we have something special for you. In celebration of Christmas, we decided to go back through the archives and highlight some of our best insights from our guests about the importance, the beauty, and the hope of Christmas. We're start off today with an interview I did last year with Keith and Kristyn Getty, who have partnered with Crossway to release the The Sing! Hymnal. In this clip, we talk about Christmas hymns and why they have so much power to prepare our hearts for worshipping our Savior.

Matt Tully
My guess is that if you were to poll 100 evangelical Christians, a good majority of them would say that even if they don’t say they love hymns, generally speaking, there are at least a couple of Christmas hymns that they just cherish and that just mean so much to them. What do you think it is, Keith, about those classic Christmas hymns that makes them so special for so many of us?

Keith Getty
I think we have to go just a little bit deeper to the deep history of Christmas hymns, and that is that Christmas itself is a story that’s told in songs. It began with four songs, and so all the way through Christian history, from the earliest reinterpretations of the Christmas story and the wonder of the Incarnation, Christians have reenacted those songs. And so songs around Christmas are as old as Christmas themselves. In fact, even if you look at the British history of it, where we come from, they were actually known as the rebel songs. So, for example, before the Bible was available in the English language, the one time of the year people were allowed to sing in English was actually around the Christmas season, where they could sing these songs, telling the story of Christmas, telling the story of the Bible. And similarly, when the Puritans began to enact a lot of strict rules about what you could or couldn’t do in church services, dancing, would you believe, the only time of year you did that was at these slightly rebellious groups at Christmas. And so the word carol is actually a French dance, which actually comes from those people who were slightly rebelling against the Puritans. But the point of it is that they are as old as Christmas itself and it’s very endemic for that. So it means the art is true; the art is authentic. It’s attracted the greatest artists in history, whether it’s folk art or whether it’s classical art. And so we have, honestly, just extraordinarily great hymns and then an extraordinarily deep tradition, so that at Christmas time it is possible to see carols in Hollywood movies, in high street stores that have nothing to do with Christianity (phrases from them), because that’s what great art does.

Kristyn Getty
I think early on in our hymn writing, carols really inspired us because one of the things we get excited about is trying to set lyrics and melodies that create a hymn that people might be able to carry with them throughout their life.

Keith Getty
One of the big challenges was we were now one generation into the modern worship movement. And so there wasn’t really a taste in our generation, or even an understanding, for hymns. And so I had the privilege of working with Stuart Townend and with Kristyn in writing hymns, and they’re both English graduates who love stories. Most of our conversations revolved around great stories, whether it be the novels our kids were reading, great old stories of the past, and they’re both great storytellers. With Stuart and I with “In Christ Alone,” with Kristyn and I with all the stuff that we were writing, for Christmas and other seasons, we were trying to tell stories in imaginative ways. And I think the Christmas carols really do that well, don’t they?

Kristyn Getty
Oh, absolutely. Some of the best stories. And they’ve become the lead Bible storytellers of the season. And again, it’s a testimony to how music gets into places that other things don’t. They connect to people even in such deep ways, if they’re not tracking with the depth of everything that’s being sung, there’s something about them. And so it’s just a phenomenal opportunity to communicate the things that are true about Christmas in the songs that people sing. And also the importance of repeating. Year by year we may get to Christmas and think, What are some of the new songs? We’re trying to write new hymns all the time—

Keith Getty
We try to write one every year.

Kristyn Getty
Always. But they should never replace the best of what we have. There’s something so significant about year after year repeating these so that they become part of people’s lives through all the different seasons of a little child excited about opening presents in the morning and an older person who’s struggling to work out how to get out of bed in the morning on Christmas day. And these songs speak to both, and I think that’s exciting.

Keith Getty
It’s a great point because, again, when you “repeat the sounding joy,” to take the Christmas phrase itself, you find in a Christmas hymn, number one, the singing is better; number two, people know the songs for their whole lives; and number three, they think about their meaning in more profound ways, and they emotionally interact with it more. Christmas is actually a challenge to us for all seasons. In one of the early years of the Christmas tour, we had this campaign of why don’t we try to do the rest of the year what we do with Christmas? Because if you’re a pastor or a speaker or a preacher or a Christian leader, if you’re a parent or a grandparent, if you’re a teacher, part of our responsibility is to give people hymns that they carry with them their whole lives, because it is just so healthy for them as well.

05:22 - Distinguishing Christmas Tradition from Truth

This next clip is from an interview I did with New Testament scholar Andreas Köstenberger. He's the coauthor of The First Days of Jesus: The Story of the Incarnation. In this clip, we talk through some of the most important and mysterious parts of the Christmas story, like the star in the sky over Bethlehem, and the significance of the virgin birth.

Matt Tully
So what was going on with the star? I think that’s a detail in this story that has often puzzled or fascinated Christians as we think about whether there were miraculous things going on there? Or is that some kind of natural astronomical phenomenon?

Andreas Köstenberger
We have less than absolute certainty. There’s a certain mystery here. Of course, the Messiah is called a star in the Old Testament. And so certainly there’s a metaphorical dimension. But in addition to that there clearly seems to have been some astronomical phenomenon going on in Jesus’s day that resonates with the fact that wise men—or in the original language Magos, from which we get the term "magician" (but I think it was not so much a matter of magic in the ancient world as more the idea of people who explored the deeper mysteries of the universe, including the constellation of the stars)—went to see Jesus. This is part of their identity and so God apparently used some astronomical phenomenon to guide them to the Holy Land.

Matt Tully
Another question that I think Christians might often have relates to the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin. And I think we all have a sense of the importance of the doctrine. It’s a pretty central doctrine of the Christian faith, one that has been central since the very beginning. And yet sometimes there’s a little bit of confusion or a lack of certainty on why it’s so important that Jesus was born of a virgin. Not even simply that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, but it is important that he was born of a virgin first and foremost. What would you say to that?

Andreas Köstenberger
Yes, I think this is absolutely essential for the Christian faith to understand that in order for Jesus to die for our sins on the cross he had to be not only fully God and fully man, but that he had to be born sinless without going, on his father’s side, through the damaged line. Because ever since the fall—as David says, In sin my mother conceived me—and so the idea that Jesus’s human nature was not tainted by sin is vital. Paul talks about this in the book of Romans as well, namely the importance that Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh, but he himself was not a sinner in his human nature. And this enabled him to die not for his own sin—as he would have had to if he was a sinner himself—but he was able to give his sinless life for our sins. It’s a great opportunity at Christmas to articulate the nature of our salvation and how it is that the incarnation is absolutely essential for our salvation.

Matt Tully
A term that’s often used related to the incarnation and Jesus’s birth that might sound a little intimidating—maybe some Christians might not be super familiar with—is the hypostatic union. Can you break that down for listeners? How would you explain what it means and why it’s an important doctrine to hold?

Andreas Köstenberger
There are some very important theological doctrines that were formulated in the centuries following the birth of Christ. Of course, that’s not a term you would find in Matthew’s or Luke’s birth narratives themselves, but it is a very reasonable way of putting all the data together about who Jesus was. The idea is that, as John tells us in his Gospel, Jesus was the the pre-existent Word who eternally existed with God from all eternity, even prior to creation. And it is that Word that became flesh in Jesus. We see here the idea that Jesus was one person with two natures—a divine and human nature—and so he is both fully God and fully man. Think of the Gospel of John, for example: on the one hand there are very strong repeated claims being made that Jesus was God, such as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And then repeatedly the Jewish authorities pick up stones to stone Jesus. They understand that he claimed to be God. And yet at the same time you see Jesus’s humanity on full display in the Gospel of John. Jesus is tired. He sits down at the well. He’s thirsty. And so we see that Jesus combined both deity and humanity in himself. He is the only unique person for whom that could ever be said. Even God the Father did not come to earth and take on flesh, nor did the Holy Spirit. Even within the Trinity, Jesus’s nature and mission is unique in that regard.

11:36 - What Was the Trinity Doing on Christmas Day?

When it comes to the story of Christmas, we're rightly focused on the birth of Jesus in that stable all those years ago. But sometimes we wonder, What was the Father doing in the incarnation, or the Spirit? In this next clip, theologians Matthew Emerson and Brandon Smith explain the role of the Father and the Spirit in the incarnation of the Son. Matthew and Brandon are coauthors of the book Beholding the Triune God: The Inseparable Work of Father, Son, and Spirit from Crossway.

Matt Tully
Let’s actually get into the incarnation story itself, the Christmas story. I think sometimes people can have the sense that these are theologians, like yourselves, imposing these extrabiblical categories and nuances on things, and it’s an imposition on the biblical text. But I hear you saying, Brandon, that this is really an effort to try to be faithful to restate in a clear way what Scripture actually is teaching on these things. We’re trying to do justice to these different passages that give us different angles on a single reality, namely God himself. And so what are some of the key passages that you’d point to that speak to—I’ll start with the Father—the Father’s role in the sending of a Son in the incarnation?

Brandon Smith
A little clarification: I’d say that there are specific passages and there are also theological patterns that you have to hold in. Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, he talks about, “I have come to X, Y, Z.” The Father has sent him to do these things. So even if in Matthew 1 and 2 there’s not a specific “the Father sent the Son into the womb of Mary,” that kind of thing, that’s going to come up really quickly. Now, of course in Matthew you have the phrase “conceived by the Holy Spirit.” It’s very specific. But that the whole story of Jesus is the idea that “I have come to do these things that my Father has sent me to do.”

Matt Tully
Sent by the Father.

Brandon Smith
So that should just always be in your mind. So I think that’s where it’s not just the passages, although there are passages, obviously, where he talks about being sent, but also you have to have those things in mind to be able to apply the passages where it’s not as clear. With the Father and the incarnation, that’s a good example of that.

Matthew Emerson
I think also, along with the “I have come to . . . etc.,” which speaks to both the Father and the Son, but if we’re talking specifically about the Father, this “I have come” language is implying being sent to do something. That language is then explicit in John. “The Father has sent me into the world to do X, Y, Z.”

Matt Tully
I think of John 3:16–17: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” So there we get a very clear statement of God sent his Son into the world in order that the world might be saved through him. So is there more beyond just the idea of the Father sending the Son? Are there other ways in which we would say that the Father was involved in the incarnation?

Matthew Emerson
Well, I think I would say it depends on how narrowly or broadly you mean incarnation. The sending language is, I think, the major way that the Gospels describe the Father’s act in the incarnation, or appropriating the incarnation of the Father. I guess you could say it that way. I also think, though, that throughout Christ’s life, if you take incarnation more broadly, his earthly ministry—certainly his baptism and the transfiguration—are really key places to talk about the Father’s activity in the incarnation, namely his statement that “this is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” He is acknowledging Christ according to his humanity as Israel’s Messiah.

Brandon Smith
And the Father receives his obedience. He says, “The Father’s going to glorify me. I’m going to hand all these things over to my Father.” So there’s an act of the Father receiving the benefits and the point of the incarnation on the other end.

Matt Tully
“Not to do my will, but the will of the Father who sent me.”

Brandon Smith
That’s all an active work of the Father. It’s not like he sits back and waits for Jesus to go take care of everything.There’s this active element. The Father’s always there. The father’s always with him. “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” He’s being imaged by him. All those kinds of things.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is one who, because there’s this explicit, clear passage that speaks of the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, coming upon Mary and causing her to be pregnant, that’s a little bit more obvious to us. But even that story can be confusing to us. What is going on here? What is the Spirit’s role in the conception and birth of Jesus? How would you describe that?

Matthew Emerson
Well, let me tell you what’s not going on. No, I’m just kidding.

Matt Tully
Well, it’s important to allude to that because I think sometimes people have gone wrong. Non-Christians, certainly, people from other religions who get confused about what it is that we believe about the Holy Spirit and Mary and what happened.

Matthew Emerson
It’s not a sexual encounter. Just to state it.

Brandon Smith
Mormons are very clear about the Father’s role in a sexual, biological encounter with the Spirit. So yeah, another thing that separates us from Mormons.

Matthew Emerson
Yes. When you talk about the Spirit overshadowing Mary, we’re talking about the creation of the human nature of the person of Jesus Christ, hypostatically uniting the human nature with the divine nature. The person of Jesus Christ exists in the moment of the miraculous conception, and that’s the work of the Holy Spirit. The hypostatic union is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Matt Tully
In that passage where it talks about the Spirit and Mary, is there an illusion back to Genesis with the Spirit hovering over the waters and the Spirit’s role in creation itself?

Matthew Emerson
In the early church, they made a very clear connection between the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters and then Christ’s three descents in his incarnation. So he descends, first of all, into the womb of Mary. Then he descends into the waters of baptism in the Jordan river. And then he descends into the waters of death in between his death and resurrection. And so I do think that language of the Spirit overshadowing is an allusion to the hovering over the waters of Genesis 1:2. Yeah. Now, if you don’t want to take the rest of it as a thing, that’s fine. But I do think that at least in the incarnation, that’s an allusion to Genesis 1, for sure.

18:14 - There’s More to the Christmas Story Than You Think

In this next clip, New Testament scholar Benjamin Gladd and I discuss the beautiful portion of Luke 1 known as "Mary's Song." Ben is the author of From the Manger to the Throne: A Theology of Luke.

Matt Tully
Let’s jump into Mary’s song, this beautiful portion in Luke 1 where Mary offers up this prayer in song to God in light of the news from Gabriel. I want to look even a little bit before we get into what Gabriel says to Mary and kind of walk through that. It’s a passage that we’re all so familiar with, and I think we can sometimes read through it quickly and miss what’s going on here. So Gabriel says to Mary, “He [your son] will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” So first, what would a Jewish hearer, like Mary, have understood about the phrase “the Son of the Most High”?

Benjamin L. Gladd
The Son of the Most High. That is a very high title. My sense is that title is a divine title. It’s very close to a divine title. In fact, later on in verse 35, I think that title’s unpacked even more. It says the holy one will be born and he will be called the Son of God. And so there’s a lot of debate about that. When it says the phrase Son of God, does that simply mean that Jesus is a king, just as David was the son of God? Is this a Psalm 2 idea? We hear the Son of the Most High. In fact, it’s really in Mark’s Gospel, I think, where we really get this phrase unpacked in a great and profound way, that Son of God does not simply mean Jesus does what his Father does or what God does; just as God rules, so Jesus rules. Yes, that’s part of it, but Jesus is the Son of God ontologically. He is divine. And that’s why in Luke’s Gospel, Luke loves to use the term "kyrios, or Lord, throughout his Gospel. Luke labels Jesus kyrios*, or Lord, and the disciples will use the term Lord, and they may not think in terms of, Oh, he’s Yahweh incarnate. There are times when they probably aren’t thinking that, or when other people use the term Lord. For example, here in verse 42: “in a loud voice she exclaimed, ‘Blessed are you [talking about a Mary] among women, and blessed is the child you will bear. But why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’” So this is amazing because Elizabeth calls Jesus Lord while he is in the womb of Mary. She may be just simply referring to Jesus in a way that says he’s master, he’s a great one, or something like that. But the use of Lord here is very careful. There may be a side of this that even evokes Yahweh incarnate, that he is Lord. Because Lord is the most common way of designating Yahweh in the Old Testament. And look at verse 45: “Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her.” That, in verse 45, is clearly Yahweh. So the previous verse, or previous two verses, the use of Lord there—

Matt Tully
It seems like he’s trying to connect those two.

Benjamin L. Gladd
That’s the idea is that Luke is connecting Jesus’s Lord in the womb, and then the Lord in the Old Testament fulfilling his promises. So he’s starting to bring the two together. And we’re just in chapter 1. It’s fascinating.

Matt Tully
It must have been so, in some ways, shocking. Mary’s response in light of these kinds of statements is all the more amazing when you know that she’s perhaps thinking along these lines. What does it mean that the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David? What would that have conjured in her mind?

Benjamin L. Gladd
I think the Davidic promise in 2 Samuel 7, and texts like that, where God promised to David that he will have a descendant, he will reign from the throne. There’s a whole network of Old Testament texts that really resonate very well here. And this would be pretty standard stuff in the first century. what’s unusual is parenting kyrios with a Davidic servant.

Matt Tully
Because the Davidic servant was not necessarily thought of as being divine.

Benjamin L. Gladd
No. I think there are Old Testament hints. There are some passages, such as Daniel 7 and even in Micah 5, where it says his comings forth are from long ago. There is something enigmatic. There are a couple texts—Psalm 110, and this is amazing because Jesus even quotes Psalm 110. David said, “to my Lord.” Who is “my Lord” there? And Jesus cites that text as a proof of his preexistence. In fact, he this is in the midst of a polemic, and he’s talking here to these religious teachers and he goes, Oh, you guys think the Messiah is just the descendant of David. But then he goes on the cite Psalm 110, “David said, ‘My Lord.’” And so Jesus is saying, Oh, but the Messiah is not simply a descendant of David. The Messiah has actually preceded David, and he has existed before David existed.

Matt Tully
And yet he’s also a descendant.

Benjamin L. Gladd
In his humanity he’s a descendant.

23:52 - Navigating Grief During the Holidays

The holiday season is often a time of joy and celebration with family and friends, but it can also be a time of year filled with sadness, as we grieve those who are no longer with us. This next clip is from an interview I did with Nancy Guthrie, where we talk about grief during the holidays. In this clip, Nancy offers encouragement to those who are grieving some kind of loss this Christmas. Nancy is the author of What Grieving People Wish You Knew About What Really Helps and What Really Hurts.

Matt Tully
What would you say to someone who’s listening right now and is feeling the pain of loss, and maybe the pain feels truly overwhelming to them and they’re not sure how they will cope with this holiday season. What would you want to say to them?

Nancy Guthrie
First of all I would say this is the holiday season to maybe not do everything the way you’ve always done it. Because a lot of those traditions do bring pain. Don’t feel obligated—don’t let your family force you into feeling obligated—because this is the way we’ve always done it. Maybe you want to try something different this year. But as I said earlier, be aware wherever you go, whatever you do, the sadness will likely go with you. And so don’t let that surprise you. I would look for some allies, whether it’s in your family or someone you can have handy on the phone, to talk to when things get difficult in the midst of some of these social situations or family situations. Someone who is a safe person to process with. But then I think specifically sometimes as everybody is saying, Happy Thanksgiving! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! and we just want to pull the covers over our head, expect that you’re going to feel sad. Because there will be times of really deeply missing that person you love. But I would also say, be open to joy. There are aspects of the truth of God becoming flesh and entering into this world to dwell among us that help. And when we think about what that means—why he did this—we we recognize that this baby who was laid in a manger is one day going to be hung on a cross. Why did he enter into the world knowing that that was going to be the case? It’s because he has come to take sin and death upon himself. There really is cause for joy in the midst of this Advent season for you because we know that the reason Jesus came the first time was to do everything necessary to one day put an end to sin and death. And even as we sing, Joy to the world! The Lord is come! He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found, as you sing those words let them fill your heart with anticipation that that day is really coming! The Christ who came as a baby is going to come as a conquering King and when he does, death is going to be gone for good. He’s going to call the body of that person you love so much out of their grave, he’s going to fashion for them a resurrection body fit for living forever with him in the new heavens and the new earth. See the holidays as the center point in which all of that has become your solid hope for the future and take hold of it today.

27:56 - How to Wait for Christmas in an Age of Instant Gratification

How to Wait for Christmas in an Age of Instant Gratification (Jonathan Gibson)
This final clip is from a conversation I had with Jonathan Gibson, author of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel: A Liturgy for Daily Worship from Advent to Epiphany. In this excerpt, he talks about how as we long for and prepare for Christmas, Christ's first Advent, we're reminded to long and prepare for Christ's return, the second Advent to come.

Matt Tully
We all know the challenge that we can feel when it comes to keeping Christ at the center of our hearts during the holiday season. Christmas can just bring with it so much busyness. We can kind of just feel like, Oh, wow! Next week is Christmas! And we kind of didn’t even notice because of all the things that we had to do, all the things we were checking off of our to-do list. And that actually connects to something that you emphasize in this new book that you’ve written, but others have emphasized this too, that Christmas is really a season of waiting. Advent is meant to be this season of waiting, and even the idea of waiting is a pretty foundational biblical concept for Christians. I wonder if you could unpack that for us. Why is the concept of waiting, expectation, and longing such an important thing for us not to miss as we think about the Christmas season?

Jonathan Gibson
Advent speaks about the coming of Christ, actually focused on the second coming of Christ, while we reflect on his first coming. And the Christian Scriptures—Old and New Testament—give us a picture of God’s people being a waiting people. We are waiting for Jesus to arrive in the Old Testament, and through the Old Testament, key people—patriarchs and matriarchs—are all waiting. They’re waiting for a son to be born, or they’re waiting for some season in their life for things to turn better, like Joseph in slavery in Egypt. God’s people throughout the Old Testament have the posture of waiting, of anticipation of something better is coming. And then when Jesus does arrive, we see this stated most clearly with Simeon and Anna when they talk about that they had been waiting for the salvation of God, and now it has dawned in this baby child, Jesus. But it continues for New Testament believers. It’s not like the waiting is over. Yes, Christ arrives in his first Advent, and he inaugurates the kingdom of God. He secures redemption for us. And yet God’s people are still called to be a waiting people. Paul says we are waiting for God’s Son to be revealed from heaven. And so we’re waiting for the second Advent, for the parousia. And so the orientation of God’s people, Old and New Testament, is shaped by Christ’s Advent. His first Advent for the Old Testament believers, and his second Advent for the New Testament believers. We struggle with that in our culture today because everything’s instant—instant coffee, texts come in and they expect to reply instantly. You get annoyed even when you see the little dots flashing on your phone. You’re like, Come on, come on!

Matt Tully
Type faster!

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah, and then you see it disappear and someone starts again. You’re like, All right, come on. What are you going to say?

Matt Tully
We’re just so oriented towards quick.

Jonathan Gibson
Yeah. Everything has to be instant. We don’t know what it is to wait. And Advent is actually known in traditional Anglican circles as “Little Lent.” Lent before Easter is the “Big Lent,” and this is known as “Little Lent.” And so some church traditions actually fast during Advent, waiting to then celebrate Christmas with a big meal. But they sort of enter a period of not enjoying certain foods or drinks for that short period of four weeks before Christmas. And again, that’s one way of trying to discipline yourself for waiting. You’re waiting for something. Fasting is one form of trying to wait better.

Matt Tully
And I think sometimes we can think of waiting as the absence of the thing we’re waiting for and that can be the focus of the waiting, whereas actually, in some ways, this intentional waiting period, the cultivation of this, is all about anticipating the thing that is to come that we’re going to receive. And something you said a few minutes ago about the first and second Advents, I think oftentimes, at least for me, I think of the Advent season as really just focused on remembering the waiting that Israel did for Jesus to come as a baby. But you said that maybe it’s actually more connected to Christ’s second Advent in many ways, that that’s the ultimate hope of the Advent season. Unpack that a little bit more.

Jonathan Gibson
In the tradition of the Christian church, the season of Advent has been primarily about focusing on his second coming. Now I think the reason it’s tied to the Christmas season is because his second coming is connected to his first coming. So the way I like to talk about it is it’s a season of meditating on his second coming while we muse upon his first coming. We’re waiting for his glorious appearing, and we do that by reflecting on his humble first appearing. He’s going to come in glory with the angels to judge the living and the dead, but he came quietly into the dark streets of Bethlehem. Silently was he born, without anybody recognizing him or seeing him. And so there’s this beautiful contrast between his first coming and his second coming. In the first one he’s clothed in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, and in the second he will be clothed in glory and light, sitting on a throne. So that’s been the tradition in the Christian church, and I think we’ve lost that. We’ve lost, again, the anticipation and the expectation that Jesus is coming again. And I think, again, because our culture shapes us to be very this-worldly focused—everything is just about the instant and in this moment—we don’t really lift up our eyes to think, No, we have a glorious future when Jesus returns. And it’s good to have a time in the year where you have a concentrated focus on that. And so that’s really what Advent is about.

Matt Tully
Thanks for joining us on this journey through the archives of The Crossway Podcast. We hope these excerpts have been enriching and encouraging for you just as they were for us. If you want to hear more of any of the interviews featured today, we've added links to all of them in the show notes below. And if you liked this compilation episode, let us know! Send us a note. And check out the one that we did on the topic of apologetics. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes as well.

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