Jesus by dying for us enables us to be changed (for unlike Scrooge we cannot change ourselves). We by nature are wrong with God because of what each of has done wrong, but Jesus  offers us the opportunity to be forgiven and become  right with God. We become as he is –  a son or a daughter of the living God. He becomes our brother. 

What’s Christmas about and what does it show us about what means to be a Christian? 
Many people enjoy Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”. (My favourite version is undoubtedly Michael Caine, pictured above, in that great classic “The Muppet Christmas Carol”.) 
 “A Christmas Carol” is a wonderfully crafted story telling of Scrooge’s moral reformation. We all know the story.  Thanks to the intervention of the three ghosts, Scrooge realises he is a miserable, grasping miser. He changes and becomes instead a generous and kindly benefactor. 
Many people think that this is a picture of the Christian faith. Becoming a Christian they think means like Scrooge turning over a new leaf, being good, going to church. God loves us if we are good (new Scrooge) and hates us if we are bad  (old Scrooge). Therefore we need to become like new Scrooge and do good and then God will love us. 
 This is wrong. A better guide than Dickens is a man called  Athanasius (below Scrooge) writing in the fourth century. He said about Christmas 
“Christ became what we are so that we might become what He is.” 
 Let me explain. “Christ became what we are”. This is Christmas: that the God who made the entire universe became a human being,  lying in the manger, tiny, weak and helpless. He became like us, crucially including in our vulnerability to suffering. In fact he was not only vulnerable to suffering, he amazingly actually chose to suffer for us  by dying on a Roman cross and this was the reason he was born. 
A great exchange occurred at Christmas. Through Jesus’s birth God “became as we are” – becoming a human, being born and dying  – that we may “become as he is.” 
 “We become as he is. “ Not that then we become God but rather that we are adopted into Gods family. Jesus by dying for us enables us to be changed (for unlike Scrooge we cannot change ourselves). We by nature are wrong with God because of what each of has done wrong, but Jesus  offers us the opportunity to be forgiven and become  right with God. 

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The Apostles desired that we would apprehend the truths of our faith together. They intended that the process of sanctification would be corporate. Through singing, we begin to enact this responsibility. Every verse is an articulation of truth, mediated through our fellowship with one another. Our choruses unite, and this is why we sing.  

However the history books record our age, there is one theme upon which every volume will agree. Without need for qualification or debate, each analyst will affirm: the present era signals the advent of individualism. Aided by a mirky river of other trends—consumerism, utilitarianism, moral relativism—the priority of the individual is a fact of our time, one which only the most myopic millennial would dare to deny. The injurious effects of such thinking are also a point of common agreement. Social commentators of every ideological persuasion readily note the need for corporate cohesion. We humans do better together. We must fight to reestablish an identity, around which we can congregate, so as to flourish.   
Notwithstanding a plethora of noble institutions, each playing their part to combat the juggernaut of individualism, the Christian’s primary point of community must be the church. For every believer, the present age of social dysfunction should serve as an emphatic exhortation toward membership, fellowship, accountability, and service in the local congregation. 
Beyond this initial observation, there are questions that might be asked. For the pastor, how should his philosophy of ministry adapt to account for the problems of the time? How could he orient the ministry rhythms of the church, to forge a defense against the tide of individualism? Moreover, how might he lead in offense, so as to render mute the plague of this era, and champion the cause of koinonia? My suggestion is simple—indeed, so basic that its inherent worth is often overlooked. Pertaining to the Lord’s Day, and the liturgical practices of each church, Christians must sing. With unprecedent vigor, every congregation should be led in song, lifting their voices in unison, so as to rehearse the doctrines of our faith.  
That singing would manifest a powerful assault to the enthronement of the individual is perhaps not self-evident. Every Sunday we sing hymns, because…that’s what we do. Christians have always sung. It’s right to worship God through music. Therefore, this Lord’s Day, let’s make music again. If we have never probed the conceptual premise of pairing voice and melody, its inherent worth may not be clear.
Aesthetics
First, regarding aesthetics, consider the relationship between truth, and beauty. As the history of philosophical thought has consistently affirmed, these transcendental qualities do not stray far from one another. Indeed, Keats contended for a conceptual unity when he wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”1 In all spheres of life, these two qualities go hand-in-hand.  
No meaningless abstraction, this relationship has practical implications, informing our behavior on a daily basis. As a general rule: when we perceive verity, we ascribe glory. And when we behold beauty, we apprehend truth. This is why, for example, we know better than to enter a court of law, wearing pajamas. Because the environment is one wherein truth is pursued, decorum and dignity are commended. Intuitively, we leave our flip-flops at home. Similarly, as we take in the majesty of the Alps, flippant comments are prohibited. The apprehension of great things commends the articulation of truth, and if not, then silence. Without being instructed, we understand what nature of speech is required.   
Consider now the act of singing on a Sunday morning. Certainly, it is possible to congregate and rehearse truths without melody. Indeed, corporate confessions have been part of the church’s liturgy for centuries. But they have never supplanted the singing of hymns. There is something intuitive about worship through music. The proclamation of truth in accordance with a melody is as natural to the Christian, as eating, sleeping, and breathing are to a new-born child. The reason for these issues is from the transcendental dynamic between truth and beauty. As the regenerate heart articulates divine indicatives, the irrepressible reflex is to ascribe to them value. The church seeks a tune. By appending a melody, Christians ordain the truth with beauty.  
For this reason, it would seem strange for the pastor to suggest, “let us stand, and speak these words together…Amazing grace, how can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?” He knows better than to quash the impulse of our souls. The appropriate response is to ordain such truth with beauty. These words must be sung.  
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As the days darken and we find ourselves increasingly besieged by barbarism both within and without, we are likely to find the lifeboat of the church inundated with more refugees like Ayaan Hirsi Ali—cultural converts who realize that the worldly goods they valued cannot sustain themselves without the aid of Christianity. This may prove either a blessing or a curse; it all depends on how prepared our churches are to offer these converts the necessary catechesis. 

In 312 AD, by the banks of the Tiber River, a seasoned Roman campaigner stood weighing his options. The struggle in which he was engaged was, to his mind, not merely personal but civilizational. Roman order and all that it stood for was under threat from the rise of expansionist barbarian tribes, which were mobilizing a vast population against the West. At the same time, Rome was rotting from within as the viral spread of exotic mystery religions ate into the moral fiber of the next generation. For decades, Rome had endeavored to fend off these threats with military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, it found itself losing ground.
The Emperor Diocletian had tried to reverse the decline with a revival of Roman patriotism and Roman values based on a revival of the polytheistic state cults. But polytheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life? The spiritual void in Roman life had merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma, and the result was a world where cults preyed on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action. Rome could not withstand the Goths, Slavs, or Persians if it could not explain to their populations why it mattered that they fought.
Polytheism was bankrupt; that much seemed clear to Constantine. If he was to take control of the Empire and actually renew it, he must ground his project in something deeper and more enduring. Christianity alone seemed to have the staying power—the philosophical depth and moral fiber—to save a dying civilization. Accordingly, having seen a strange omen in the morning sky, he opted to interpret it as a message from the Christian God: “In this sign, conquer.” From then on, he called himself a Christian, a lapsed polytheist, steering the Empire he gained away from its decadent paganism toward a social and legal order based upon Christian teachings.
There are of course other interpretations for what happened that fateful morning at Milvian Bridge. One is more cynical: a self-aggrandizing warlord, looking for some kind of leverage over his foes, some justification for his rule beyond mere military might, invented a cock-and-bull story about seeing the sign of the cross in the heavens, thus attracting gullible Christians to his banner. Over the next quarter century, he continued to play on their credulity and ambition, pretending to advance the cause of Christianity while really using the church as a prop to support his own rule. The legacy of this was “Constantinianism,” the millenium-and-a-half devil’s bargain between Christianity and state power, in which the church sold its soul to gain the world. Another is more charitable: Constantine really and truly did have a “conversion experience,” and humbled himself in gratitude before Jesus Christ who had granted him victory and, he thought, a mandate from heaven to remake Rome in obedience to Christ. In the quarter century that followed, he endeavored, albeit with stumbling steps, to secure the church against its foes within and without, to wean his people away from their paganism, and to govern as befitted a servant of Christ.
In between these two interpretations lies perhaps the most probable one, the one with which we started, and which Peter Leithart defends at length in Defending Constantine. Constantine was not seeking merely his own glory or the glory of Christ; he was seeking the glory of Rome, and he saw Christianity as the civilizational glue that could rekindle the dying embers of Roman order. He genuinely recognized and esteemed much that was good in Christianity, but saw it chiefly as a means to an end, not an end in itself—at least at the outset. But he did, crucially, submit himself (as much as any proud Caesar could, at any rate!) to the teaching of the church, and in time came to fully embrace Christianity and seek to advance the kingdom of Christ. And not only did he seek—he succeeded: paganism was sent packing, churches were filled, gladiatorial games ceased, and the Christian Church was positioned for a millennium and a half of civilizational dominance that, while far from perfect, was good for the church and for the world. At what point in his personal development was Constantine “saved”? At what point did he have what we would call a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ”? Such are the questions we modern evangelicals are itching to ask, and yet why should we need to know the answer to these questions? The secret things belong to the Lord our God.
It is a timely moment to reflect on the conversion of Constantine, because our civilization stands at a similar crossroads to that which confronted this Roman leader at Milvian Bridge. And many of our own seasoned leaders are making a similar gamble: Christianity alone can provide the glue to hold us together, the spiritual resources to revive our peoples. Indeed, the highly attentive reader might have noticed that most of the phrases in the first two paragraphs of this essay were direct quotations from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Why I Am Now a Christian,” an essay that sent shockwaves throughout the ranks of Western intelligentsia a few weeks ago. Ali, after all, has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the “New Atheism” for the past two decades, campaigning alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others for a world without religion.
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