Highlights from a 2008 Harris Poll nation-wide survey of 2,126 U.S. adults:

• Americans who believe in God: 80 percent (unchanged since the last survey in 2005)
  
  
• Americans who believe Jesus is the Son of God: 71 percent
  
  
• Americans who believe in the resurrection of Jesus: 70 percent
  
  
• Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth: 61 percent
  
  
• Americans who believe in the survival of the soul after death: 68 percent
  
  

I have two friends who are best friends. Each was the best man in the other's wedding. They talk every day, sometimes more than once, on their cell phones. They live only a few blocks from each other. Yet recently, one told me that he hadn't seen his best friend in two months—two months! That's more than a hundred phone calls, and countless chances to hop in the car or walk a few blocks to see ...

The greatness of God is most clearly displayed in his Son. And the glory of the gospel is only made evident in his Son. That's why Jesus' question to his disciples [in Matthew 16] is so important: "Who do you say that I am?"

The question is doubly crucial in our day, because [no one is as popular in the U.S. as Jesus]—and not every Jesus is the real Jesus. …

There's the Republican Jesus—who ...

"On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me." Tony Bennett's voice wove its subtle magic throughout the shopping mall. How appropriate, I thought, as I watched the shoppers scurry from store to store. The advertisements promised "just the right gifts at just the right price," allowing us to "give like Santa and save like Scrooge."

As I listened, I was struck with how we have turned Christmas ...

Texts: John 1:1–18

Principle: Instead of being judgmental, God invites us to communicate truth the way he does—by incarnational living.

Objects: Half a dozen Nerf-like balls—all very soft—with "Truth" written on them in large, block letters, and a paper bag big enough to hold all the balls

Experience: Take the paper bag, filled with the balls, to the pulpit with you.

While preaching ...

The virgin birth is far less mind-boggling than the power of all Creation stooping so low as to become one of us.

When the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci went to China in the sixteenth century, he brought along samples of religious art to illustrate the Christian story for people who had never heard it. The Chinese readily adopted portraits of the Virgin Mary holding her child, but when he produced paintings of the crucifixion and tried to explain that the God-child had grown up only to be executed, the audience ...

While writing about the Nativity in his book The Faces of Jesus, author and pastor Frederick Buechner reflects on an early scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Three characters—Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo—are keeping watch at night, discussing the possibility of having seen a ghost. In the midst of their conversation, they briefly stumble into a discussion about the night of Christ's birth. ...

Though there were auspicious signs that preceded and accompanied his birth, preparing the world for the majestic and kingly, the birth of Jesus itself was of the humblest peasant parentage, in an unimportant town, and in the roughest of buildings. He made a career of rejecting marks of status or privilege: He loved lepers, washed the feet of his disciples, befriended little children, encouraged women ...

We all have various Christmas traditions. Few of us probably have a tradition quite like the Robynson family's. In his book Crazy Love, Francis Chan shares their story:

This family of five, with three kids under the age of ten, chooses to celebrate the birth of Christ in a unique way. On Christmas mornings, instead of focusing on the presents under the tree, they make pancakes, brew an urn of coffee, ...