These are Christmas days. This is the period of the year that is celebrated as the anniversary of the birth of Jesus. I fear that if some stranger from a foreign land, who knew nothing of the character of Jesus and His history and nothing of Christianity, were to happen in our midst during this Christmas time, he would think, from the character of our festivities and the kind of our demonstrations, that we were either, by our bonfires and guns and rockets and fireworks, celebrating some warlike hero who, in the midst of belching cannon and blazing musketry, had delivered his country from peril, or else that we were, by our revelry and dissipation and debauchery and riot, celebrating some heathen god of pleasure like Bacchus, the Roman god of the wine cup. And it is strange--unaccountably strange--that men should so pervert the sacred Christmas time into a season of unusual and disgraceful indulgence in sin. What does our text say? "He was manifested to take away our sins." "He was manifested;" what does that mean? Oh, it means more than you and I will give ourselves time to fully take in. It is said that the angels desire to look into the wonderful fact of the condescension of Jesus Christ, the prince of princes, in becoming man in order to save sinners. But though _angels_ thus desire, very few of _us_, for whom this wonderful humiliation was suffered, give enough time or attention to it to either understand it or care much about it. We are too much occupied with these lower things to take any special interest in things infinitely higher. Paul, in the second chapter of the Philippians, tells us how Jesus humbled himself. Let us see verse 5: "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made _Himself_ of _no reputation_ and took on Him the form of a servant, and humbled Himself and became obedient unto _death_, yea even unto the death of the cross." Christ, then, was the equal of God, the Father, worshipped by angels; and yet He consented to become man, and so be made "a little lower than the angels." But He not only became man, He became a servant among men. So His life was one of lowly service and unremitting toil for others. He once girded Himself with a towel and washed the feet of His disciples. But He not only became man and servant to man, He went to a deeper depth of humiliation than any other ever descended to: He suffered as an evil-doer, though in fact He was the only good and pure man that ever lived. "He was numbered among the transgressors," though He was guilty of no transgression, and He descended down to the bottom floor of disgrace--He was nailed on a cross and left there to die as you hang the worst criminals by the neck till they are dead.