Stop treating Jesus like Santa Claus.
Christmas morning chaos. Wrapping paper flying everywhere. Kids tearing into presents while parents frantically snap photos. We love the tradition of gift-giving because good gifts show someone really knows us. They see us. But what if the best gift available this Christmas isn’t something you unwrap?
The Real Gift
Daron challenges our “Jesus Claus” mentality in this Christmas message. We treat Jesus like Santa with a naughty-nice list, sending up prayer wish lists and hoping we’ve been good enough to get what we want. The biblical story reveals something different: Jesus came as Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” The almighty God showed up not with lightning and thunder, but as a defenseless baby we instinctively want to hold close. That’s intentional. God’s presence is personal, promised regardless of your performance, and actually your purpose as a human being.
Your Soul Knows
Even if you’ve never been religious, something inside you longs for the peace and guidance God offers. That feeling isn’t random. You were designed to be indwelt with God’s presence. Your spirit knows what your mind might not admit: you need more than presents under a tree. You need the presence of a God who fully knows you and fully loves you anyway.
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Episode Summary:
Are you treating Jesus like Santa Claus? This Christmas Eve message will challenge how you think about faith, gifts, and what God really wants to give you. Discover why the greatest gift isn’t under the tree.
This is the second episode in our Holiday Season of Sermons series, featuring powerful messages from recent Christmas celebrations. Whether you’re exploring faith for the first time or looking to go deeper, this message will awaken you to the true meaning of Christmas.
Key Takeaways:
- We often treat Jesus like Santa Claus, basing His love on our performance
- Grace means you don’t earn it, deserve it, or buy it, it’s freely given
- God’s presence is personal, designed specifically for you
- God’s promises are based on His character, not your performance
- You were created as a spiritual being to be indwelt by God’s presence
- The Christmas gift isn’t a present, it’s God’s presence in your life
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Daron: What’s up podcast community, Daron Earlewine here with you and we have got a treat for you. It is the holiday season of sermons coming your way. We’ve put together a group of sermons I’ve given over the past couple of years and chopped them up, got them all produced, looking pretty, sounding great, ready for you to enjoy them and hopefully it stokes some Christmas cheer for you.
I hope you enjoy these sermons. I hope they encourage you. I hope they awaken you. I hope they equip you to become who you were born to be. And so this season and every holiday season after that, I hope that all the content we put out here on the Daron Earlewine Podcast continues to inspire you and awaken you to become who God’s created you to be. And remember that you were created on purpose, for a purpose. You have a God who is so near you’re not far, and He’s for you, not against you. So hope you enjoy these holiday season of sermons and appreciate you downloading this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast. Created on purpose and for purpose.
Good afternoon and Merry Christmas Eve. So stoked to have all of you here together. My name’s Daron Earlewine. I get to be one of the teaching pastors here at Mercer Road Northeast and honored to be able to be a part of our Christmas Eve celebrations. And I love Christmas. I love everything about Christmas.
Our family’s been celebrating the Christmas season since the night of Halloween. That’s not a joke. We were handing out candy as we were putting up all four of the trees that were put up that day. So we’re a little crazy about Christmas. You don’t have to be crazy about Christmas, you can be regular about Christmas, but the thing I think is interesting about Christmas is we all have different traditions, things maybe we’ve done our whole life. That’s kind of the awkward part for some of you young folks when you get married. If you haven’t talked about what is like law at your family’s Christmas, that’s gonna be one of your big first arguments. I’m just gonna let you know. Save you the counseling fee on that one.
But there’s different things. I remember for me as a little kid, we always did this, and we actually did this this past week, celebrated with my family. Anybody ever heard of Burl Ives before? Yes, you have to be born with a 19 in your birth year to know what that even means. We always had this Burl Ives book, and we would read it. We had a tape. Does everybody know what tapes were? Anyway, this tape, and then at some point our dog ate the tape and we kept the book, and then when YouTube came into existence, we figured out that it was on YouTube, and we’ve been watching and listening to this Burl Ives song tape book thing for like 40 plus years. And you have all these traditions that are awesome, that are great.
And then there’s rules. And one of the great things I think about Christmas, Christmas morning, is presents. And there are, let’s just say there’s two main camps in the philosophy rules about how presents work. One of the people, one of the groups of people, they love Christmas, they love Jesus, they love their country. They’re family people, they understand things that make sense. Then there’s another group of people and we just could probably call them sociopaths. They’re crazy that don’t understand really what the true spirit of Christmas is. They may be on the naughty list. The Grinch was somehow in their family tree. And here’s how this breaks down. It comes down to the rules of how you open the gifts.
Because there’s the people who sit there and watch the people they love open the presents they bought for them. And in that moment, you soak up all those memories and you see their face and you think about how you bought that for them and it’s so happy and it’s wonderful and sometimes angels descend and sing during this present by present type of situation. And then there’s the sociopaths, where basically someone counts to three and it’s chaos and everybody opens at once. If you’re in that everybody opens at once situation, stop. Just cut it out. This year I’m gonna give you permission. Just take it easy, slow down.
Our family, we like the whole Christmas thing to go as long as possible. So we do like a first round or so, then you call a timeout. You get a little breakfast. You hit a little round of breakfast, maybe a little sausage egg casserole, amen. And then you go back to opening more presents. It just makes it last all day long. If you haven’t tried that, you’re welcome, give it a shot.
I love Christmas morning, I love how it breaks down. And the thing about giving gifts at Christmas is, sure, we maybe have made it a little more commercialized than is necessary, but there is actually biblical precedent for gifts at Christmas. Read the Christmas story, the wise men came and they brought gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh to baby Jesus, which is obviously a very popular gift for babies. I’m sure most of you have that on your Amazon wish list. You know what I mean? I just love some myrrh, some frankincense this year. But it made sense, so there’s a deeper meaning to it.
But there’s this precedent that we give gifts around Christmas. And I think what I love about gifts and what you’ll experience, maybe tonight if you open some presents, maybe tomorrow, is when someone gives you a great present, there’s something about you knowing they get you. They see you. They know you, something that makes a difference that you knew they thought of you. And it’s not just about the thing you get, but the love that you receive in that present. And I think the same thing is true for as we give presents. To give a good present, you have to really know this person. What will bring them joy? What will make them happy? What do they truly desire? And so what’s wrapped up there about our kind of obsession with giving and giving gifts, it has a lot to do with wanting to be loved and wanting to love others.
So presents, great, love them, not against them whatsoever. In fact, there’s another understanding of a gift that’s given in the Christmas story. It goes actually back 700 years before Jesus was born. There was a prophecy given by the prophet Isaiah. It’s in Isaiah chapter nine, verse six, and I’ll read it for you. It goes like this: For to us a child is born, to us a son is given. This is a great gift, this was a great present. And the government will be on his shoulders and he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. Four amazing names given to Jesus, this present, this gift that is given to us at Christmas.
The almighty God. I would really like to receive that present in my life. Like an almighty God who is actually interested and maybe for me in my life, a wonderful counselor. That’d be a good gift to get, wouldn’t it? You ever had any moments in your life where you just thought to yourself, I could really use some counsel. I could really use some wisdom to know what to do in this scenario. Prince of Peace, that’s a good name. Life is painful and it’s tough and a lot of times it’s real chaotic. It’d be really good to receive a present, a gift of someone who was the prince of peace. Everlasting Father. That’d be a good gift, a present, to receive an unconditionally loving, eternal, holy Heavenly Father. These are great names for Jesus, this gift that we receive at Christmas.
But I’ve noticed that a lot of times for us, we add one, and a lot of people, when I say this, you’re gonna go yup, but you may not have thought about it until I say it. But we’ve got a new take on Jesus. There’s not so much Prince of Peace, there’s not so much wonderful counselor, not so much mighty God. We like to refer to Jesus, I think, often as Jesus Claus.
And I think for most of us, we may not want to admit it, but this is a lot of how we relate to Jesus modern day. We want Jesus to be Jesus Claus. And basically Jesus has all of the principles of Santa Claus, he’s just better, because he’s Jesus. So we try to stay off the naughty list, we gotta do the right things, and we gotta send a list of things we want, those are prayers. And we wanna do the best we can so that Jesus Claus brings us the presents, all the stuff we really want in life.
And what do we usually think or say or feel when we start not getting the stuff from Jesus that we really want in life? Well, most of the time, at least when I talk to people, often when things are happening in their life that they wish weren’t happening, they go, what did I do to deserve this? You know what? I must be going through this because God’s mad at me. Meaning, I’m treating Jesus like I think he’s Santa Claus. He’s got a list, he checks it twice, he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice, and you’re either getting blessings from God or you’re getting a lump of coal. And we call that karma, except Jesus doesn’t have anything to do with karma.
He’s the only person that came up with this idea of grace, which means you don’t earn it, you don’t deserve it, you can’t buy it. His love, his favor, his forgiveness, his presence is given. And you see, when we start treating Jesus Christ like Jesus Claus, we miss out on the reality of who he is, and we make him into some version of what we kind of wish he were.
And I think this Christmas I’d like you to maybe think about is what would it look like if we began to get our hearts around this thought: that we weren’t actually created originally and even now to be sustained by presents, by gifts, by stuff, as fun as they are. But the reality and what the true gift of Christmas is not a present, it is presence. The presence of God amongst us, the presence of God for us. And the gift of Jesus is truly his presence.
And the beautiful thing about this, we talked about why you love to give and receive gifts, is because you want to be known, you want to be loved, and when someone hits a bullseye in giving you an amazing present, you go, well, they really knew what I needed. That’s exactly what Jesus is on Christmas, because he knew that he created us for and by love. He’s created us for relationship with him and with each other. And so the gift of the presence of God at Christmas meets every need that we have, the depths of our soul. And when we don’t have that, life just doesn’t seem to work.
Tim Keller said it like this, he’s a pastor and author. He’s since passed away. I’ve always loved this quote. He said: To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved, well, is a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense. It humbles us out of our self-righteousness and it fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
A beautiful thought that at Christmas we celebrate the fact that God fully knows us. And he fully loves us. To be seen, to be known, to be loved, and to still be accepted. To still have someone desire you in their presence is what our souls long for.
So let’s look into the Christmas story, we get a little more understanding of how God understood this, our longing for presence, more than presents. Matthew one tells the Christmas story like this, chapter one of the book of Matthew. I’m gonna start in verse 18, I’m reading it from the message paraphrase. It goes like this: The birth of Jesus took place like this. His mother Mary was engaged to be married to Joseph. Before they came to be married, Joseph discovered she was pregnant. It was by the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t know that.
So Joseph, chagrined but noble, determined to take care of things quietly so that Mary would not be disgraced. While they were trying to figure a way out, he had a dream. God’s angel spoke in the dream: Joseph, son of David, don’t hesitate to get married. Mary’s pregnancy is spirit conceived. God’s Holy Spirit has made her pregnant. She will bring a son to birth, and when she does, you, Joseph, will name him Jesus. You will name him Jesus, which means God saves, because he will save his people from their sins. This would bring the prophet’s embryonic sermon to full term. Watch for this: a virgin will get pregnant and bear a son. They will name him Emmanuel, Hebrew for God is with us.
Then Joseph woke up and did exactly what God’s angel commanded in the dream. He married Mary, but he did not consummate the marriage until she had the baby, and he named the baby Jesus. Joseph’s given two instructions. Name him Jesus, God saves, and Emmanuel, God is with us. This gift, this child that was given is a great present, but the power of it was actually the presence of God coming to earth for us.
And as we look at the idea of presence, I wanna look at three things really quickly today, just to kind of get our hearts, our minds, our souls around this idea. And I think one of the first things I want us to see that I love is this: God’s presence is personal. God’s presence is personal. It’s designed for us as humans, but it’s designed for you personally.
And as I look at the biblical story, the thing that’s always wrecked me around the Christmas story, and I’ve used this illustration for multiple Christmases, because every time I get to Christmas Eve, I come back to this and I just can’t get my mind around this. If you wonder if God’s presence, if his desire and his design is to be personally present in your life, you have to go and look at how he showed up on Christmas. The almighty God, wonderful counselor, prince of peace, heavenly father, the holy God, how he showed up on earth.
Because I can tell you from me, if I showed up on earth and I was the mighty God, if I was mighty God, God himself, and I was showing up to do a mission, I would have probably showed up with a little bit, probably a parade of some sort. There’d probably be some kind of soundtrack involved. Probably be more like a WWE, like a UFC type entrance. Wouldn’t that be kinda cool though? Like can you imagine Jesus showing up and it’s like a whole John Cena type of thing? He’s like, you can’t see me, but you can, but you can’t.
I know we have a lot of folks, you don’t kind of immerse yourself all the time, you’re here, it’s Christmas Eve, we’re so glad that you’re here. I just wanted to give you permission. If I’m even slightly funny, it’s okay to laugh. I know you may be thinking, this is church, I don’t know what the rules are in church, I don’t know, do we sit, do we stand, do we clap, do I gotta cross myself, what’s the deal? And laughing, is it okay? Yes, it is totally okay. Unless I’m just bombing and then just stare at me, because that’s good for me too. Feels great, honestly, just when people stare blankly at you for the whole 25 minutes, it’s amazing. If you’re a rookie here at church, we’re a very, very laugh friendly congregation, just so we know.
The thing about that is if I showed up, I would have probably wanted the people on earth to know I am God, I’m the mighty God, and you’re going to deal with how amazing and powerful and awesome and higher than you that I am. I’d probably had some lightning happening, maybe squirreled down on a tornado, made something happen to be like I’m God and I’m here, hello. And I think all of us, if you thought about it, if you really had to think about it, like how would I show up if I was God? It would be something like that, I think.
And if we did, here’s what would’ve happened. Because the interesting thing is every biblical situation where human beings encountered divine beings, angels, or whatever it would be, you know what the absolute common denominator of the response to all human was when they saw angelic type beings? You know what the first response always was? Fear, fear and terror, falling down on their face like I just don’t wanna die in this moment because I’m human and you’re divine. Absolute terror and fear. And if God had sent Jesus like that, our first interaction of what does really God want, does he want us to be in his presence, would have been no, he doesn’t. He just wants us to be scared of him.
But here’s what I think about. All of us as human beings, even if you don’t really like babies, if you’re around a brand new born baby and someone gives you the opportunity to hold this baby, they walk over to you, they start to bring the baby over to you, and usually you get a little smile, maybe you’re a little like, oh boy. And then we all do the exact same motion. We’re soft and we just go…
Right? And you go, how do you know that God’s desire is to be personally present in my life? Well, when he introduced himself to the world, he was a humble, defenseless, newborn baby. And what he wanted from us as human beings is not to go like this, but to go like this. To personally receive the presence of God.
See, but not my life. My life is absolute disaster. It’s very, very difficult. Things are really bad. I don’t think that God comes into people’s life like me. I’m very normal. I’m not special. The good news is if you look at the Christmas story, these were some super regular normal people and God wanted to be personally present in their life. You look at Jesus’ ministry, he chose 12 guys, uneducated, regular, kind of passed over, misfit guys, and said, here’s how I’m gonna do my ministry for three years. I’m just gonna be present with you guys and teach you how to live life as it was meant to be lived.
God’s presence, it’s personal for you. Here’s another thing that’s really good. God’s presence that we celebrate at Christmas, it’s a arrival. It’s also about a promise. It’s promises that aren’t based on performance. Now this is once again when we start to try to bring Jesus Claus back into it. Because yeah, there’s these promises in God’s word, but that’s all based on the fact that if I’m really doing great as a Christian, right? Because that’s my concern because I’m not doing all that well as a Christian. So this is all predicated on me really being a great performer. Isn’t there some kind of heavenly scales where it’s like you give some money to the poor, you make some things happen, that makes up for what you did last Friday night. And then once God sees if he’s gonna bring blessings and presents and promises to my life, he’s looking to tip the scale. No? That’s not what the Bible says.
See, the Bible is based on the promises of God. And here’s the beautiful thing. The promises of God are not determined on your character, but on his. Promises like this in Psalm 145, verse 18: The Lord is near to all who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth. He promises to be near to all. Jeremiah 29:13: You will seek me and you will find me when you seek me with all your heart. Here’s another promise, Matthew 28:20, and surely, the words of Jesus: And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. He is with you, he promises to be with you always. Last one, James 4:8: Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.
These are promises, and guess what? The Bible is loaded with so many more promises of God promising his presence in your life not based on your performance, but based on his love and grace. That’s really, really good news. Because I would love to know that the Almighty God has promised to be a part of my life. I would love to know that the Almighty God, the Prince of Peace, has promised to bring his peace into my life. I would love to know that the Everlasting Father has promised to be a part of my life. I would love to know that Emmanuel, God with us, has promised, I want to personally be a part of your life. And he wants to do that because his presence, it’s not a place, it’s actually our purpose. God’s presence is not a place, it is actually our purpose as human beings.
And we get this one a little bit off too, because oftentimes in our culture, and not even our culture, I think globally, we like to think about certain locations as holy places. Like we go to that place and we meet with God, we worship God, maybe we do some sacrifices, whatever the religious tradition is, we go to this holy place, and then at the place I experience the presence of God, and then I leave, and I leave the presence there and I go just do my life and whatever I wanna do.
And I hear us talk about that sometimes, like man, I gotta be there every Sunday for church, because I kinda leak out all the God stuff. Like I gotta get back and recharge and be in the sanctuary and the auditorium where that’s really where the presence of God is and that’s a holy place. And then all week I’m kinda by myself. Is a lot of times is how we think, or if we don’t think we think that way, if you stop really and think about how you feel during your week, you would go, you know what, I don’t know that I think that, but I actually do kinda feel that. I do feel lonely and I do feel like I don’t have the power that I need to love the way I need to love. And so maybe I have been seeing God’s presence as a place that I go to.
Here’s the good news about Christmas. You and I as human beings were designed to actually for the purpose of being indwelt with the presence of God. You see, God’s desire from the very beginning, you open the first pages of the Bible in Garden of Eden, God made the world and he said it was good. He made human beings and said it’s very good. And he brought us to life and he breathed within his spirit or his breath and that’s how we came to life.
I believe that every single one of us are actually more of a spiritual being than we are a physical being. Someday we’re gonna die. Sorry, little spoiler alert there, but we all end the same way and this body will turn back to dust but you will never stop existing, friend. You are a spiritual being and you were created to be in the presence of God. God created Adam and Eve in the garden. He said this was the plan. We’re gonna be in the presence of God. We’re gonna work with God. We’re gonna serve with God. We’re gonna be loved by God. He’s gonna take care of our needs and we’re going to live eternally with him.
If you read the biblical narrative, what happened is Adam and Eve got a little bit confused between presence and present. They began looking at their life and going, I don’t know, can we really trust God to give us all the stuff we want? Like I kinda want him to give me the ability to know right from wrong and kinda be like him. And I think maybe we could do better than letting him take care of our needs. We need stuff, we need some more presents in our life. And they trusted God and what happened in that process is sin separated us from God’s presence.
And as you keep reading throughout the Bible, the whole rest of the Old Testament is God setting up a system and a structure, choosing a people for himself that he was present with, that he could begin to reestablish the connection with humanity to once again bring us back so that every single person would have the opportunity to move back into the original creation of humanity, that our spirit could be brought to life and we could be indwelt with the actual divine presence of God. That is your purpose as a human being.
It’s why there are times when you feel distant from God or even if you’re here today and you’ve said, I’ve never really had a relationship with God. It’s why when you think about God, you actually have this feeling where I kind of miss him. And it feels weird to you because you go, I’ve never really been religious, but anytime I start thinking or hearing people talk about Jesus or these ideas of peace and comfort and guidance and direction, and I don’t have it in my life, there’s something within me that begins to long for that. Like, I would like to actually have that in my life. You see, that’s your soul. That’s your soul calling out through your being to say, this is what you were created for. You are not just a physical human being. You are a dearly loved child of God and to live life and live it to the full and live life as God created it, you need to accept his presence so you can come to life.
His presence, it’s not a place, it’s your purpose, and it’s for all of us. That’s why it says in John 3:16 through 18, I’m reading it from a different paraphrase, it says it like this: This is how much God loved the world. He gave his son, his one and only son, and this is why, so that no one need be destroyed. By believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.
This is the Christmas message. It’s not about a present that you unwrap, it’s about the presence of the living God coming into your life and it’s personal. God knows you. He created you on purpose and for purpose and he knows everything that you’re going through. He knows everything that you’ve gone through. He knows everywhere that he’s taking you in his life and he wants to walk that path with you.
God’s presence in your life this Christmas, it’s a promise. It’s not based on your performance. God doesn’t have a list that he checks twice and decides whether or not he’s gonna actually show up in your life when you need him. He’s promised to never leave you or forsake you. He actually even chose the name Emmanuel, God with us, to remind you of that.
And this presence, it’s not a place. It’s your purpose and that place is right here within you. And my guess is that there’s probably three groups of people here tonight. The first group, you showed up to Christmas Eve because someone asked you to, someone made you, or for some reason you just felt like you were supposed to be here. And as I’m talking, you say, Daron, I have kind of treated Jesus like Jesus Claus. And honestly, I kind of assumed he probably didn’t want anything to do with me because I kind of screw up a lot. And what I want to give you the opportunity here after the song is that today maybe you could actually come to life, body and spirit, that you could accept the living presence of God within you and begin to live life as he created you to live it.
There’s a second group of folks here probably, and for you, you’re just at a place where at some point in your life you believed in Jesus, maybe even asked him in your life, but if you’re honest and you look at your life right now, his presence is hard to find because you’ve stopped building your life on the promises of God. And that’s one of the reasons that this next year we want to actually read through the New Testament together, so that this idea of Jesus wouldn’t be the stuff you’ve heard about, rumors or hearsay, but you could actually begin to know and understand the promises of God to build your life upon so that his presence transforms you from the inside out.
And then there might be a third group. You say, you know what, Daron, I’ve been doing that and I’ve been growing, but tonight I want to make a commitment to even take it to the next level. And not that I would just be in God’s Word and grow, but I think maybe in 2025 it’s time for me to start leading others to understand God’s Word, to start actually making disciples through my life.
So I want you to stand with me. We’re gonna sing this song and I just want you to kind of allow God to speak to you. Allow this time for him to fill you with his presence and figure out which one of those groups you’re in and what your response might be this Christmas. Because he has something so much better for you than a present with a bow, with some shiny wrapping paper. He wants to give you his presence, himself, in your life.
Father, as we worship you through this song, I just thank you for the gift of Christmas that you came yourself, humbly as a baby, to let us know that this is personal. Father, this is not a chance. This is not something we get lucky with. It’s something you’ve promised. And God, I thank you that the deepest longings of our soul to live a life that becomes something more than just jobs and accomplishments. Thank you so much that that’s not just something we can’t get away from. It’s actually something that’s drawing us to you. It’s what we were created for. Help us to respond to that courageously and humbly tonight. We ask this in Jesus’ name.