Let's regain our childlike wonder this Christmas
G.K. Chesterton once lamented, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” I believe there are precious few things that give us greater pleasure than experiencing the wonder of Christmas through the eyes of a child. Yet, alas, we are no longer children ourselves.
Bah, humbug!
In his book The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning blames our “wonderless” condition squarely on science and the denial of a supernatural God.
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“There was a time in the not too distant past when a thunderstorm caused grown men to shudder and feel small. But God is being edged out of His world by science. The more we know about meteorology, the less inclined we are to pray during a thunderstorm. Airplanes now fly above, below, and around them. Satellites reduce them to photographs. What ignominy — if a thunderstorm could experience ignominy! Reduced from theophany to nuisance!”
Sadly, there are many among us who feel that the world needs more science and less God as if the solution to all that ails mankind is simply more data, more analysis, better technology — more science. To many, belief in the supernatural is simply an annoyance and a stumbling block to real intellectual progress. “Get out of the way, theists! We’re trying to accomplish something important here.”
Scientists who reject divine wonder and who banish the supernatural from their universe will never gain the answers to the questions they seek. Without God in their rubric, they will never come to realize that sometimes the answer to their centuries-old questions is a “who,” not a “what.”
Samuel Johnson, a well-known 18th-century English philosopher, expressed the mistaken notion that science-sans-God can reveal the answers we seek, declaring that wonder is nothing but “the effect of novelty upon ignorance.” He posits that, as adults, our lack of wonder is evidence that we are getting wiser, more sophisticated, more worldly — less childlike, as if that were a good thing. In other words, he is saying, "wonder? Bah, humbug!"
The wonder of Jesus
While it’s true that, as adults, we are no longer impressed by the magician who pulls the coin out of a child’s ear — a cheap imitation of God’s ex-nihilo creation of all things from nothing — there are still plenty of truly spectacular phenomena that should never cease to thrill us. At the top of that list should be the supernatural appearance in this world of God himself — the one through whom “all things were created, things in heaven and things on earth” (Colossians 1:16).
Christmas is a time when the wonder of God cannot be sidelined, ignored or diminished — not even by science. Christmas is a time when our long-lost childlike sense of amazement should come rushing back to us, saturating our senses and filling us with giddy joy and wide-eyed wonder again.
The true hope
With a sincere goal of rekindling the wonder that the arrival of Jesus into this world should arouse in our complacent, adult hearts, I've grabbed a few select passages from our Christian Bibles — reminders of who it is that we celebrate this season.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1, 14).
“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3).
“Even the wind and the sea obey him” (Mark 4:41).
“He commands unclean spirits, and they come out” (Luke 4:36)
“He rebukes fevers, and they depart” (Luke 4:39).
“He causes the blind to see, and the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk, and lepers are made clean” (Luke 7:22).
“He commands the dead, and they live” (John 11:43-44).
“Though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).
“Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).
I'm not sure what is really to blame for our grown-up complacency and nonchalance, but whatever it is that keeps us from enjoying the wonder and excitement that we once experienced as children, reflecting on the birth and the life of Jesus should always rekindle a childlike wonder in all of us. Don't let science (or anything else) edge out your sense of joy and wonder this season.
Let’s let Jesus penetrate our callous and world-hardened defenses. Let’s rekindle an unbridled joy and delight in the true hope that Christmas should evoke in all of us. Let’s be amazed with childlike wonder at the sum and substance of the Son of God.
John Chipman currently serves as a Teaching Pastor at The Spoken Word Christian Church in Rancho Santa Margarita, California. Prior to joining the staff at The Spoken Word, John faithfully served as a chaplain in the Orange County Jail Ministry. He is the author of God’s Elect: The Chosen Generation and publisher of the Christian blogsite Bibleinsights.net
