A Very Merry COVID ChristmasSample

Praise God—You Are Holy

Within 48 hours of my basement quarantine, I was exposed as unholy. My wife was too. As we awaited the results of my COVID test, she felt the extra weight of the pandemic pushing down on her tired shoulders as she covered for all the things I couldn’t do while stuck downstairs (cooking, dishes, virtual learning with the kids, etc.). For my part, I was throwing a one-man pity party for the agonizing experience of watching too much Netflix.

Because I am a D- Christian, I let the stress get the best of me and started a dumb argument with Kim from a socially safe distance. 

The morning after the argument, you can guess how I felt. I’m a wimp of a Christian. For a guy who’s been given a spirit of power, I sure am good at letting that power collect dust on the shelf of my soul.

Ever been there? In a thousand different ways, COVID can test our spiritual strength, forcing us to adapt, to change, and to trust. Maybe you run out of patience with Zoom meetings, fighting over devices, and rethinking all the old systems that used to work at your job or at your church. After failing too many of these tests, we can look in the mirror and honestly wonder what God must think about us.

But this is why I love being a Christian. The Christian faith is primarily about blessings that are clearly not deserved; about Jesus declaring things about us that seem to be totally untrue. 

Like our holiness: “For [God] chose us in [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Ephesians 1:4). God chose us to be holy; and through the blood of Jesus, that is what you and I are. You are holy, a word that my thesaurus equates to “godly, saintlike, virtuous, pure, sinless.” Let those synonyms sit for a while in your soul. You are godly. You are saintlike. You are virtuous. You are pure. You are sinless. (Don’t roll your eyes at me; I’m just quoting the guy who was inspired to write by the Holy Spirit!)

“In his sight.” Did you catch those words too? We aren’t just holy in the sight of the world that doesn’t know about the darker corners of our personal lives and the unspoken thoughts of our hearts. No. We are holy in the sight of the Holy One of Israel, the God who sees and knows everything we have done in our moments of weakness. Despite knowing that, God still says this: “You are holy.”

The morning after COVID broke me, Christ was there for me. The day my sin declared me hopeless, my Savior declared me righteous because I am holy through Jesus. Friend, you are too. If God kept a record of your corona wrongs, who could stand? But the only record that God is keeping is the perfect record of his holy Son, the record that makes you holy.

Sooner or later, COVID gets to all of us. Thankfully, we have a Savior who got to us first. At Christmas, Jesus Christ took on flesh, the same flesh that he would offer on the cross so that you and I would once and for all be—say it with me—Holy.