Does God work? We don’t usually think of God as working perhaps because we think of God as transcending such mundane activity as work. And yet the Bible records many examples of God at work.
Creation is the first instance and perhaps the finest example of God at work. “God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!” (Genesis 1:31).
Giving the Ten Commandments to Moses and the people of Israel on Mount Sinai was work. “These tablets were God’s work; the words on them were written by God himself” (Exodus 32:16)
Ecclesiastes 3:11 describes a wonderful picture of God at work. “Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”
We know that salvation is a work of God that no one else can do. “For I am not ashamed of this Good News about Christ. It is the power of God at work, saving everyone who believes–the Jew first and also the Gentile” (Romans 1:16).
Christmas represents God at work through the gift of Jesus. The birth of Jesus, God in human form, is God at work in the most intimate and personal way. Christmas is God at work among us.
Through the incarnation – God in human form in the person of Jesus – God is at work among us in a personal way. As Jesus began his ministry, that is how he saw himself – doing God’s work. He explained this to the disciples, “My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work” (John 4:34). And the people ministered to recognized God was at work through Jesus. “The people realized that God was at work among them in what Jesus had just done” (John 6:14).
And so at Christmas time, we celebrate God’s work in the birth of Jesus and God’s continued work among us through the ongoing ministry of Jesus.