Generally, I’m not a sentimental person, but that kind of changes in the month of December. I love Christmas lights, Christmas movies, Christmas carols, and all the other kitschy Christmas traditions that feel old-timey and familiar.

One of my favorite features of the Christmas season, however, isn’t sentimental at all. It’s the fact that at Christmastime, we have an excuse to remember the “incarnation” of the Son of God.

“Incarnation” comes from a latin root (carnem) that means “flesh.” When used of Jesus, it refers to the moment when the eternal Son of God was born as a human baby. He “became flesh.”

Jesus is fully God and fully man. If he weren’t God, he wouldn’t have the authority to forgive our sins and he would have no right to demand our worship. If he weren’t a man, he could not rightly take our place as the perfect sacrifice for sin. Our entire hope as believers rests on the reality that Jesus is the “God-Man.”

As critical as that fact is, there was a time when many professing Christians questioned whether Jesus was really God. It’s hard to overstate just how close—from a human perspective—Christianity came to rejecting the Bible’s teaching on this issue.

The so-called “Arian Controversy” dealt with the question of whether Jesus was truly equal with God the Father. What started as a doctrinal conflict in a single local church became a theological battle engulfing all of Christendom, and it lasted for decades.

By the early 4^th century, churches in large cities often had a single “overseer” or bishop and several elders. The overseer of the church in Alexandria, Egypt was a man named Alexander. Alexander taught that the Son of God, “the Word” (John 1:1ff), had existed eternally as the only-begotten of the Father and was Himself God.

But one of the elders in the Alexandrian church disagreed. His name was Arius. Arius was an extremely talented teacher and was very popular among the congregation. Arius reasoned that to worship the Word as equal with God the Father is basically saying that there is more than one God. He argued that since Scripture teaches that there is only one God, this is unacceptable. The Word can’t be eternal and must have been created by God the Father at some point in the distant past. To sum up his own views, Arius coined a motto: “There was when He was not.”

Eventually, Alexander removed Arius from his post as an elder and condemned his teachings. But Arius wouldn’t let it go. He appealed to the congregation and to some of the pastors throughout the eastern Roman Empire whom he had met when he was a student. According to historian Justo Gonzalez, followers of Arius began to publicly demonstrate in the streets of Alexandria as they loudly sang the catchy songs Arius had written to explain his doctrine.

The controversy spread so widely that eventually Emperor Constantine himself decided to intervene in 325 AD. He summoned all the overseers of the empire to the city of Nicea in hopes that they could work through the conflict and reach a unified conclusion.

Keep in mind, many of the men in attendance at this meeting had been tortured or imprisoned because of their faith. These were pastors, not eggheaded scholars. The fact that they were able to gather publicly with their brothers in ministry must have been a tremendous blessing.

To the credit of the vast majority of overseers, when they finally heard Arius’ views expounded, they immediately and passionately rejected them. Apparently, the man who was tasked with explaining Arius’ views (Eusebius of Nicomedia) wasn’t even allowed to finish his speech. The paper was snatched from his hands and ripped apart!

The council confidently asserted, “We believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, that is from the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made.”

In spite of the fact that nearly every Christian pastor who participated in this conversation vehemently agreed that Jesus is and always has been God the Son, it would take decades before Arius’s teachings would be totally eradicated. It’s a story of God’s incredible providence and the protective care of the Chief Shepherd for His church.

It's important that we recognize just how easy it would be to start thinking wrongly about the character, nature, and works of Jesus Christ. That’s why I’m glad we remind ourselves every year: Jesus Christ is the Son of God—true God from true God, begotten, not made—come in the flesh so that we might be saved. All glory to Christ!