God Rest Ye Merry Quotes

“Joy is deep satisfaction in the will of God, and this must be coupled with recognizing the reality that God’s will is everywhere and in everything. There is no place where we may go and be allowed to murmur or despair because God’s will is somehow “not there.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“We sometimes do not appreciate the magnitude of the problem here. How could the eternal Word of the eternal Father take on limits? How can infinitude and finitude marry? The doctrine of the Incarnation proclaims frankly and without embarrassment the most stupendous miracle that can be imagined. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the Incarnate Deity.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“We are told that this child was born in order to rule, for the government will be upon his shoulder. And the second thing we are told about His government is that it will continually increase (v. 7). He will bear the government upon His shoulder, and it will be a continually increasing government. This increase—unlike the growth of secular governments—will be a blessing, and not a pestilence. This is the real big government.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Our good God, our overflowing God, our God of yes and amen, has always been able to promise far more than we are able to believe.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“The star over Bethlehem is not what we were expecting. If we don’t accept the astrological math option, then that means the star came down into our sky, and stood over a particular house—fifty feet up, say. Does faithfulness to Scripture require us to accept absurdities? That a flaming ball of gas, many times larger than our entire earth, came down into Palestine in order to provide first century GPS services? And that it did so without incinerating the globe? As I’ve mentioned earlier, we need to take a lesson here from our medieval fathers in the faith, brought to us via Narnia. “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” If we can leave our bodies behind when we go to Heaven, why cannot a star leave its body behind to come to earth? But any way you take it, the Christian faith flat contradicts the truncated cosmology of moderns. Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve. And if you choose the wrong way, you are going to have to stop sending Christmas cards.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Isaiah gives the Messiah a five-fold name. His first name is Wonderful. We cannot reckon how marvelous God’s plan for us in the Incarnation actually is. The second is Counselor. God does not just leave us to be staggered by what He has done—He counsels us, He teaches us. The third name is Mighty God—remember this is the same God as the God with us, Immanuel. The Deity of the Messiah is firmly stated centuries before He comes. The fourth name is Everlasting Father. God the Son is not to be confused with God the Father, but at the same time, the Son of God is a Father. He is the bridegroom, married to the bride of Christ, the Church. In our corporate capacity, Christ is our husband. As individuals, the Church is our Mother and Christ our Father. He is an Everlasting Father. The last name is Prince of Peace. Though His coming has been the occasion of war as the darkness has vainly sought to extinguish His light, in order to keep it from spreading, the long-term result of His coming is necessarily the Peace of God.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“The obedience of Jesus on the cross can be distinguished from His obedience throughout the rest of His life, but it cannot be separated, just as His body in life and in death can be distinguished (easily), but never separated. If the body that was suckled by Mary was a different one from the one that died on the cross, we are all still in our sins.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“We celebrate Christmas, and everything that follows, as an act of war. War? What about peace on earth, good will toward men? Jesus also said that He did not come to bring peace on earth, but rather a sword. How may this be reconciled? Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but the peace He brings is not the peace of dithering diplomats, who like nothing better than talk, talk, talk. Our Lord Jesus does bring peace, but He does so as a conquering king. He brings peace through superior firepower. That firepower is not carnal, but it is potent, and the principalities and powers (those that are left) tremble at the might wielded by a faithful Christian church, uncontaminated by idols, worshiping God in the spirit of holiness.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“One of the most important things we can learn in our celebration of Advent is the foundational truth that calendars are not silent—calendars always tell a story. Now just because a calendar tells a different story from ours does not mean the story is wrong, although it frequently is. But a competing story is always wrong (and idolatrous) when it replaces the story, the story of Christ, the story of salvation.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Stories organize our lives, and the stories that won’t or can’t do that are false stories. The stories that orient us, that place us back where we should have been, the stories that bring redemption, are called true stories. They go by other names if you listen to the tellers of false stories—legends, lies, myths, fairy stories. But true stories have authority to overcome the envious carping of the adversary.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“When everything is special, nothing is. God wants us to cultivate a biblical cadence and rhythm to our lives, and not a constant pounding.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“How can you give to God, who dwells in the highest heaven? You reach up by reaching down, or by reaching across. No gift given here in the right way goes missing in the final tally (Mt. 10:42). With every form of unrighteous mammon, you have the opportunity to extend grace to your fellow creatures, in the hope that they will receive you into glory (Lk. 16:9). But every gift given here in the wrong spirit is just thrown into the bottomless pit, that ultimate rat hole (Lk. 12:34; Jas. 5:3).”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“We give gifts, but the gifts also give us, and that is sometimes not nearly so much fun. You give the gift, certainly, but the gift also gives you. And it will always give the “you as you are” and not the “you as you appear in your daydreams.” And this is why you must prepare yourself for the giving. You don’t want the gift to give you, and have that “you” be a cheap toy that doesn’t make it through the afternoon of Christmas day.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Christmas should not be treated by us as the “denial season.” One of the reasons why so many families have so many tangles and scenes during the “holidays” is that everybody expects sentimentalism to fix everything magically. But Christmas is not a “trouble-free” season. We want the scrooges and grinches in our lives to be transformed by gentle snowfall, silver bells, beautifully arranged evergreens, hot cider, and carols being sung in the middle distance. But what happens when you gather together with a bunch of other sinners, and all of them have artificially inflated expectations? What could go wrong? When confronted with the message of sentimentalism, we really do need somebody who will say, “Bah, humbug.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“The birth of the Lord began to be commemorated (on an annual basis) somewhere in the third or fourth centuries a.d. It is commonly argued that this was a “takeover” of a pagan holiday, celebrating the winter solstice. But it just as likely, in my view, that this was actually the other way around. Sol Invictus was established as a holiday by Aurelian in a.d. 274, when the Christians were already a major force. So who was copying whom? And Saturnalia, another popular candidate suggested as being an “ancestor” of Christmas, actually occurred on December 17.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Do not treat this as a time of introspective penitence. To the extent you must clean up, do it with the attitude of someone showering and changing clothes, getting ready for the best banquet you have ever been to. This does not include three weeks of meditating on how you are not worthy to go to banquets. Of course you are not. Haven’t you heard of grace? Celebrate the stuff. Use fudge and eggnog and wine and roast beef. Use presents and wrapping paper. Embedded in many of the common complaints you hear about the holidays (consumerism, shopping, gluttony, etc.) are false assumptions about the point of the celebration. You do not prepare for a real celebration of the Incarnation through thirty days of Advent Gnosticism. At the same time, remembering your Puritan fathers, you must hate the sin while loving the stuff. Sin is not resident in the stuff. Sin is found in the human heart—in the hearts of both true gluttons and true scrooges—both those who drink much wine and those who drink much prune juice. If you are called up to the front of the class, and you get the problem all wrong, it would be bad form to blame the blackboard. That is just where you registered your error. In the same way, we register our sin on the stuff. But—because Jesus was born in this material world, that is where we register our piety as well. If your godliness won’t imprint on fudge, then it is not true godliness. Some may be disturbed by this. It seems a little out of control, as though I am urging you to “go overboard.” But of course I am urging you to go overboard. Think about it—when this world was “in sin and error pining,” did God give us a teaspoon of grace to make our dungeon a tad more pleasant? No. He went overboard.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Whenever we do anything on autopilot, it is not surprising that at some point we forget where we are going, or what we were supposed to be doing. And when we are just cruising in a mindless tradition, it is a short time before sin takes over.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Traditionally, both Lent and Advent are penitential seasons—not times of overflowing celebrations. This is not something we have sought to cultivate at all, even though we do observe a basic church calendar, made up of what the Reformers called the five evangelical feast days. Our reluctance to adopt this kind of penitential approach to these seasons of the year is not caused by ignorance of the practice. It is a deliberate attempt to lean in the other direction. I want to present three arguments for a rejection of this practice of extended penitential observance. First, if we were to adopt this practice, we would be in worse shape than our Old Covenant brethren, who had to afflict their souls only one day out of the year. Why would the time of anticipation of salvation be so liturgically celebratory, while the times of fulfilled salvation be so liturgically glum? Instead of establishing a sense of longing, it will tend to do the reverse. Second, each penitential season keeps getting interrupted with our weekly Easters. Many who relate exciting movies they have seen to others are careful to avoid “spoilers.” Well, these feasts we have, according to God’s ordinance every seven days, spoil the penitential mood. And last, what gospel is implicitly preached by the practice of drawing out the process of repentance and forgiveness? It is a false gospel. Now I am not saying that fellow Christians who observe their church year in this way are preaching a false gospel, but I am saying that lex orandi lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of faith, and over time, this liturgical practice will speak very loudly to our descendants. If we have the opportunity to speak to our descendants, and we do, then I want to tell them that the joy of the Lord is our strength.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Lent began as a period of preparation for Christian baptism—many of the baptisms in the early Church were performed on Easter Day. Over time, as an ungodly system of works-righteousness began to establish a deeper hold on the minds and hearts of many professing Christians, the church calendar began to reflect a false understanding of the nature of the gospel—as though holiness consisted of giving up things. Now we want to return to an explicit and Christian understanding of our days and years, which they certainly had, but we want to do this without making the same mistakes they did.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“But the way I have construed this, the weaker brother is the one who does not observe Christmas. How do we answer the charge that it is actually the other way around, and that the “observer” is one who is guilty of syncretism? This charge of syncretism is often made—the Christian year is thought to be the residue of long-forgotten compromises with paganism. And in its overgrown and encrusted forms this was frequently the case. But in certain notable instances, the reverse was true. For one great example, according to the story, the Christmas wreath custom did not come from paganism, but from a remarkable defeat of paganism. Boniface (a.d. 680–754), missionary to the Germans, had chopped down a great oak, sacred to Thor. Three days later, on the first Sunday of Advent, he prevented a human sacrifice and used the sacrificial knife of the Druid priest to cut fir boughs for the people to take home as a reminder of Calvary. And for a second example, the inventor of Christmas tree lights (non-electric) was Martin Luther. This is because Jesus is the light of the world.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“The United States Constitution does not mandate separation of church and state. The phrase “wall of separation” comes from a letter that Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists, and that phrase has no constitutional authority or ground. It was Jefferson’s opinion, which, when he was alive, he had a right to. What the Constitution actually mandates with regard to religion is two-fold: one, the non-establishment of a national church by an act of Congress, and two, non-interference with the free exercise of religion by Congress. Got that? No Church of the United States, comparable to the Church of Denmark, or the Church of England. When the Constitution was ratified, nine of the thirteen colonies had established state churches at the state level. There is no conflict if the national bird is different from the various state birds, or the national flower from the state flowers, and so on. But if one Christian denomination were privileged at the national level, this could and would lead to conflicts with the established churches at the state level. Prior to the War Between the States, the country was governed on true federalist principles, and all this made sense. But get this down. The Constitution prohibits establishing a national denomination and supporting it with tax money. It does not require every branch of civil government, down to the smallest municipalities, to ignore the nature and will of the triune God. Still less does it require them to pretend that Jesus Christ, by His birth in Bethlehem, did not actually come to establish a new humanity in His own person and work.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“The task of evangelism, now that Christ has risen, is not so much to run around at night, poking our flashlights into corners and cellars. Rather, the task of evangelism is more like pulling back the curtains. “But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Eph. 5: 13–14). Get out of that bed! Christ will shine on you!”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“We were told to clothe ourselves with humility and tender mercies. When Jesus told His disciples to follow Him, the cross is certainly in view. We are to take up the cross daily and follow Him. But we do not just follow Him to the cross—we must also follow Him to the manger. We must become little children. We must be born again—not understanding this as a Gnostic experience of being zapped by a mystic and numinous light—but rather because we are way too adult, too full of ourselves, and self-important. The new birth is the birth of humility. What do you have right after a birth, including the new birth? A baby, which is what we are invited to become. A little child.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“He, the eternal Word, the one who spoke the galaxies into existence, was willing to become a little baby boy who could do nothing with words except jabber, and in that jabbering, make glad his mother and earthly father. He, the source of all life and all nourishment for that life, was willing to be breastfed. He, the same one who had separated the night from the day, and had shaped the sun to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night, was willing to have his diapers changed for a year or so. It is not disrespectful to speak this way; for Christians, it is disrespectful not to. We believe in the Incarnation, in the Word made flesh. This is our glory; this is our salvation.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“There are two ways to give. One is an act of authority and the other is an act of submission. There are two ways to receive—and not surprisingly, one is an act of authority and the other is an act of submission. Telling the two of them apart is perfectly clear for the humble, and opaque to the proud. Were the wise men placing Jesus and Mary in their debt with these very expensive gifts? Or were they showing their indebtedness? When our federal government today cuts a check, are they exercising authority or showing submission? This is not a hard question.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Think for a moment about what a bizarre place the universe actually is, and how we moderns have tried to use our powers of imagination to tame it, instead of using our imaginations for the purpose that God gave them to us—to enable us to see it. The unbelieving mind and heart looks around at the “given” world he sees, and just takes it as a birthright norm. This is the way things “just are” he boasts, and he is “a realist” for seeing it. If someone comes back from the other side of the world with some strange tales, then the traveler is laughed to scorn for his superstitious naiveté. But the failure of the modernist imagination can be seen starkly here. The hide-bound rationalist cannot put himself in another place, and he cannot conceive of his so-called normal world being described to creatures far off, and having them laugh at it as “way too bizarre to be real.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Knowing we are in a story does not prevent real story grip from happening.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“Looked at from the side, all Christian preaching and teaching is made up of nouns, verbs, propositions, questions, and so on. In just the same way, the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper remain simply bread and wine. If a chemist were to scurry around the table when we are meeting with Christ there, he would find nothing but the regular stuff. And if a grammarian or logician were to break apart and analyze the “stuff” of preaching, he would find assertions and doctrines, nouns and verbs. He would see the form, but not the power. But saving faith, godly trust, does not stare at. Faith looks through. And so, children of God, behold your God.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“So love sacrifices, but love never sacrifices at a dead end. There have been many sacrifices that look like a dead end—remember the ironies of time—but they are not at all what they appear to be. What could have been more of a dead end than to be flogged, crucified, speared, and laid in a grave for three days and nights? And yet, even there, God was demonstrating His love for us. He was not giving us one more tragedy in a long line of them so that we might be justified in our despair. Rather, He was conquering sin and death, lust and the devil—and not giving us a lesson in pointless heroism.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything

“The one who spoke the galaxies into existence at the beginning of all things took on human flesh and consented to have his diapers changed. But He did not do this in order to demonstrate how low He could stoop, as though that stooping were arbitrary or aimless. Rather, He ordained that stooping this low would be the means by which He overcame the world. And He ordained that stooping in this way would be the means by which His disciples followed Him into the kingdom.”
― Douglas Wilson, God Rest Ye Merry: Why Christmas is the Foundation for Everything