Tomorrow Christmas will dawn on us at long last – the day that we celebrate the birth of the King of Kings, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Brothers, this has been a hard and terrible year for all of us. We have been tested in ways that we could not have imagined a year ago.

But tomorrow is OUR day – the day of glory and hope, a day when we remember how well true faith is rewarded.

I realise that our Orthodox brothers in Russia, Greece, and a few other places will celebrate the Lord’s birthday on a different day. I have no quarrel with them at all. As far as I am concerned, all who bend the knee, bow the head, and declare Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, are brethren, whether they acknowledge His birth tomorrow, or in early January. These little details do not concern me.

What DOES concern me is the fact that so many “Christians” seem to think that Jesus was some sort of magical wish-granting talisman.

And I cannot adequately express in words the sense of righteous spittle-frothing fury that I feel when I hear Churchians talking about how Jesus exhorted us all to be meek, submissive, and obedient at all times, never to raise our voices, never to be aggressive, and always to tolerate and forgive everyone’s sins no matter how evilly they act.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this in tomorrow’s podcast – and I’ve got A LOT to say on the subject. But for now, understand this, and understand it well:

Christianity is a fighting faith. There is NOTHING soft or weak about it.

Our God is a WARRIOR GOD. His arm is mighty, His roaring fury against the unrighteous is terrifying, and His attitude toward the unrepentant evildoers is best summarised in the immortal words from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As ye deal with My condemners, so with you My grace shall deal”.

Jesus Christ our Lord is the KING OF KINGS, in all of His resplendent majesty – whose very words stir hope in our hearts and strike terror in those of our enemies.

And when the day comes, He will sit at the right hand of power to judge us all. He was a HARD man, teaching HARD things back when He walked among us. He is our teacher, our leader, our moral example, and our intercessor before the Father.

But above and beyond all things, JESUS. IS. LORD.

Never, ever forget those words. We were not given a spirit of fear, but of hope – and though the light of that hope has flickered throughout this year, tomorrow it will BLAZE up brighter than ever.

Our faith was rewarded more than 2,000 years ago when our God, our King, our LORD, became flesh and dwelt among us.

He took the form of a tiny helpless infant, born in a manger in Bethlehem under a bright star. That star guided weary and beaten men, gave them hope, and told them that the King of Kings had come to dwell among us. His name was Emmanuel, Prince of Peace, and His words ring sure and true to us today, twenty centuries later.

His might and power dwells among us to this very day. The hope that He kindled in our hearts burns hot and fierce. And no day symbolises the hope that our warrior God gave us better than Christmas itself.

So rejoice, my brothers! Our God LIVES. He hears us, He loves us, He FIGHTS for us.

Our God can enter time and space anytime that He wants – which is precisely what He did more than 2,000 years ago

And our Lord can communicate with us in any way that He chooses – we have a record of His words to hold in our hands, and THE Word of God became flesh to instruct us and redeem us, to baptise us with fire and the Holy Spirit.

The King of Kings and the heavenly cavalry stand ready to help us anywhere, anytime, no matter how broken and Fallen we are.

All we have to do is ask.

Do not despair, brothers, but rejoice!!! Hope lives among us to this very day. And no matter how great the darkness, no matter how terrible the Enemy, no matter how crushing the burden, the light shines in the darkness – and the darkness has not overcome it.

There will be more of this sort of thing to come in tomorrow’s podcast, so stick around for that. There will be NO Friday T&A tomorrow – it is the day of Our Lord’s birth, and I will not cheapen or sully such a holy day with tawdry displays of flesh.

(I have absolutely no such compunctions about Saturday, though, so you’ll simply get the Friday T&A a day late. I think y’all can live with that, eh?)

Tomorrow’s podcast will also be the last for the year. I won’t do another one on Sunday, because: (a) it’s redundant; (b) it’s time-consuming; and most importantly (c) I’ll be quite busy packing and getting my butt organised for my trip over to PommieBastardLande on Tuesday.

So I’ll leave you with some songs to lift up your spirits and bring joy to your hearts, starting with a phenomenal take on a Christmas classic:

⁴ Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;
    break forth into joyous song and sing praises!
⁵ Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre,
    with the lyre and the sound of melody!
⁶ With trumpets and the sound of the horn
    make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord!

— Psalm 98:4-6, English Standard Version