Dec 24, 2019 3 min read

It’s Christmas time again.

There will be Christmas trees and lights and gift giving. There will be carol singing. There will be church services. The poor will be remembered. Christmas dinners will be held in almost every home. Christmas is a holiday of love. It is observed with more acts of love than any other American holiday. It should be.

It is the birthday of the Son of God, who taught that the first of all laws that of love, and that the one who helped others was also helping both God and His Son.

It seems an especially appropriate holiday and observance this year, when the world is perhaps more conscious of the disasters of hate and greed than ever before. Never in history, it would seem, was the world more desirous of finding a way to end wars and to substitute some finer program of solving human differences.

The angels sang to the shepherds a song which offered three things – glory to God, peace on earth and goodwill among men.

The three cannot be separated in purpose and effects, if the teachings of the Son of God whose birthday is to be celebrated on Christmas Day are accepted and practiced.

For those teachings demand that men love God, and that if men love God they must also love their fellow beings. War and crime and greed are all contradictions of the law of love. They require that men hate instead of love.

The centuries have proved more than anything else that no other program can end the great ills and miseries which affect humanity. God’s program of love is about the only program left to end the miseries of poverty, ghetto living, greed, and war.

That is why Christmas is especially important this year, when the world has become conscious of the terrible miseries caused by those things which negate love.

Christianity does not merely oppose the human crimes, but its law of love means that Christians and Christian nations must seek to aid those in need and in trouble. It must aid needy individuals, needy groups and even needy nations.

Our nation, which we like to think of as the world’s most Christian nation, despite its faults and failures, has done more for needy nations than any other. It has acted when peaceful means were called for, and even when military intervention was needed to save threatened nations and peoples. We would have been ashamed to call ourselves followers of the Prince of Peace and of Love if we had not done so.

In a nation such as ours, with our history and traditions and with our goals for human welfare, the birthday of the Prince of Peace should be and is the greatest holiday of the year.

This year it should be a holiday on which all Americans should think of ways to end human misery, even if such means do involve us in conflict to save nations and halt national and international crime.

Christmas is a holiday of love. And Jesus taught that His followers must love, even at the cost of great personal sacrifice.