Last week I tried to introduce a new Foster Family Christmas tradition—Family Yard Work Day. Virginia and Buddy were home from Auburn for their Christmas break. Kim was off work. I was off work. I thought it would be a great time to get a lot of little yard clean-up projects done and enjoy time together as a family. I thought wrong! My prediction is that there will not be a Second Annual Foster Family Yard Work Day. I will give them some sanctification points, however; they really didn’t complain that much (except for Kim).

In preparation for (what I thought would be) the First Annual Foster Family Yard Work Day, I went to Home Depot and bought everybody a pair of work gloves. And trust me, they were quite necessary. In among the weeds were briar plants. And there was a host of different kinds of those nasty weeds: some with big spikes, some with small spikes, some with spikes so razor thin that they could get right through your clothing, and occasionally your gloves. And these pesky weeds had an amazing root system. As I pulled them from the ground, the roots just kept coming up and coming up. Sometimes a single root was four feet long, with a mass of root tentacles that went in all directions.

We had an area of the backyard that had gotten a bit overgrown and these weeds and briar plants were incredibly thick. As I worked my way through them, the line from the Christmas carol, Joy to the World, kept running through my head. “No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground.” I thought, “That’s what this is; this is an infestation.” And I know that if I don’t get out there before the spring with some weed killer, I’ll have the same thing on my hands this time next year.

And that’s, of course, my point. Sin is an infestation. Sometimes I had to use clippers to cut the briars coming through the fence, but that didn’t kill the plant; it just made it less annoying for the time being. Pulling them up by the roots sounds good, but I did this same exercise a couple of years ago and they came back. But a strong weed killer should do the trick, something that will change the very nature of the chemical make-up of the plant.

And that’s what Jesus has done. His entrance into the world has provided the means for a change of nature, and unless the nature is changed, our best efforts at improvement are just window-dressing.

We went to a Christmas Eve worship service last night. After a reading from Acts 13, this was the written response from the congregation. “Alleluia! Tomorrow the wickedness of the earth will be destroyed: the Savior of the world will reign over us.” That’s good news (gospel—in fact, in the program it was called the Gospel Acclamation)! Think about that. Today—on Christmas Day—the wickedness of the earth will be destroyed, because the Savior of the world will reign over us. Something so powerful that it changes the very nature of our being will enter the world and destroy sin, in all of its infestations.

I told our family last night that Christmas marks the beginning of the end, the beginning of the end of sin and all of its many affects. “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground.” No more! No more sin, no more sorrow, no more infestation. The Savior of the world has come (“Joy to the world, the Lord has come”), and wickedness—sin, sorrow, thorns, cancer, terrorism, sex trafficking, fear, doubt, worry, abuse, random shootings at elementary schools—will be destroyed.

If nothing else, Christmas means hope. The wickedness of the earth, in all of its infestations, will be destroyed. The Savior of the world will reign. Sin and sorrow, suffering and hardship, doubt and pain and failure, disease and even death—none of these will have the last word. Christmas is the beginning of the end. On Christmas Day, God said, “ENOUGH!,” and he sent Jesus.