45 Christian Quotes about Christmas

Whether you’re looking for some quotes for your Christmas sermon series, church Facebook page, or pre-service slides, we’ve got you covered. We pulled together 45 thought-provoking quotes about Christmas from Scripture, carols, and Christian thinkers.  

They’re broken into the following sections:

• Quotes from the Bible about Christmas
• Quotes from Christmas Carols
• Quotes about the Advent Season
• Quotes about the Nativity
• Quotes about the Message of Christmas
• Quotes about Serving Others at Christmas

As you peruse these quotations, we hope you find some powerful inspiration for your Christmas season!

Quotes from the Bible about Christmas

The Nativity is based on the biblical account of Christ’s birth, so it seems appropriate to look at some quotes from Scripture about Christmas. All selections are in the ESV.

1. Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Immanuel. (Is. 7:14)
2. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased!” (Lk. 2:9–14)
3. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1:14)
4. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. (Gal. 4:4–5)
5. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. (Jn. 3:16)

Already excited about these quotes? They are perfect to use in your welcome packets and guest invites leading into the Christmas season. See how else they can be used to enrich your church’s holiday events and what else you can be doing right now to make this your best Christmas yet. Download the free ebook today to get started!

Quotes from Christmas Carols

If you don’t get a chance to sing Christmas carols during the holidays, it hardly feels like Christmas. Despite the fact that many Christmas carols include a few questionable historical and theological ideas, they’re still culturally valuable and relevant. And it’s pretty easy to find profound quotes in them.

6. Come to Bethlehem and see
   Him whose birth the angels sing;
   Come, adore on bended knee,
   Christ the Lord, the newborn King.
   Gloria, in excelsis Deo! (“Angels We Have Heard on High,” by James Chadwick)
7. Peace on earth and mercy mild,
   God and sinners reconciled! (“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” by Charles Wesley)
8. And in despair I bowed my head
   There is no peace on earth, I said,
   For hate is strong and mocks the song
   Of peace on earth, good will to men.Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
   God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
   The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
   With peace on earth, good will to men. (“I Heard the Bell on Christmas Day,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”
9. Yet with the woes of sin and strife,
   The world hath suffered long;
   Beneath the angel-strain have rolled,
   Two thousand years of wrong;
   And man, at war with man, hears not,
   The love song which they bring:
   O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
   And hear the angels sing. (“It Came upon a Midnight Clear,” by Edmund Sears)
10. No more let sins and sorrows grow,
    Nor thorns infest the ground;
    He comes to make His blessing flow
    Far as the curse is found,
    Far as the curse is found,
    Far as, far as the curse is found. (“Joy to the World,” by Isaac Watts)
11. O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer
    Our spirits by Thine advent here;
    Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
    And death’s dark shadows put to flight!
    Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
    Shall come to thee, O Israel. (“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” trans. by Henry Sloane Coffin)

Quotes about the Advent Season

In many Christian traditions, Christmas isn’t just a day—it’s a season. Advent season focuses on the hope and expectation of Christ’s birth. Here are some quotes about the excitement and anticipation surrounding Christmas.

12. Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other—things that are of no real consequence—the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison)
13. Advent Prayer
    In our secret yearnings
    we wait for your coming,
    and in our grinding despair
    we doubt that you will.
    And in this privileged place
    we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
    and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
    Look upon your church and its pastors
    in this season of hope
    which runs so quickly to fatigue
    and in this season of yearning
    which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
    Give us the grace and the impatience
    to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
    to the edges of our fingertips.
    We do not want our several worlds to end.
    Come in your power
    and come in your weakness
    in any case
    and make all things new.
    Amen. (Walter Brueggemann, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth)
14. At this Christmas when Christ comes, will He find a warm heart? Mark the season of Advent by loving and serving the others with God’s own love and concern. (Mother Teresa, Love: A Fruit Always in Season)
15. Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise. Every year we roll up all our needs and yearnings and faithful expectation into one word: “Come!” And yet, what a strange prayer this is! After all, you have already come and pitched your tent among us. You have already shared our life with its little joys, its long days of tedious routine, its bitter end. Could we invite you to anything more than this with our “Come”? Could you approach any nearer to us than you did when you became the “Son of Man”? In spite of all this we still pray: “Come.” (Karl Rahner, Watch for the Light)

Quotes about the Nativity

Christmas is about God becoming flesh and being born in a manger. We’re all familiar with Christmas images: Angels, shepherds, swaddling clothes, an infant, and so on. These elements aren’t mythical or fanciful. They’re part of a real historical story that happened on our planet.

16. For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning―not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. (Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat)
17. Jesus Christ became Incarnate for one purpose, to make a way back to God that man might stand before Him as He was created to do, the friend and lover of God Himself. (Oswald Chambers, Bringing Sons unto Glory: Studies in the Life of Our Lord)
18. Christmas in Bethlehem. The ancient dream: A cold, clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love. (Lucinda Franks, Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me)
19. Matthew loved the magi. He gave their story more square inches of text than he gave the narrative of the birth of Jesus. He never mentions the shepherds or the manger, but he didn’t want us to miss the star and the seekers. It’s easy to see why. Their story is our story. (Max Lucado, Because of Bethlehem: Love Is Born, Hope Is Here)
20. Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine. (Brian D. McLaren)
21. Into this world, this demented inn
    in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all,
    Christ comes uninvited. (Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable)
22. The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the Incarnation. (J.I. Packer, The Christian Reader)
23. The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable. (Ralph W. Sockman

Quotes about the Message of Christmas

Christmas changed everything. It changed the world in the first century. It changed the way we documented time. And for those of us who have chosen to follow Christ, it’s transforming us to this day. Here’s a collection of quotes about the life-altering, world-changing message of Christmas.

24. It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did….for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message He taught and the life He lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with Him. (Frederick Buechner)
25. The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. (Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus)
26. The spirit of Christmas needs to superseded by the Spirit of Christ.
    The spirit of Christmas is annual; the Spirit of Christ is eternal.
    The spirit of Christmas is sentimental; the Spirit of Christ is supernatural.
    The spirit of Christmas is a human product; the Spirit of Christmas is a divine person.
    That makes all the difference in the world. (Stuart Briscoe, “Meet Him at the Manger,” Christianity Today)
27. I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
28. How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments. (Benjamin Franklin)
29. The very purpose of Christ’s coming into the world was that He might offer up His life as a sacrifice for the sins of men. He came to die. This is the heart of Christmas. (Billy Graham)
30. Christmas is not a myth, not a tradition, not a dream. It is a glorious reality. (Billy Graham, The Cradle, Cross, and Crown)
31. All the Christmas presents in the world are worth nothing without the presence of Christ. (David Jeremiah)
32. Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world. (C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle)
33. If we could condense all the truths of Christmas into only three words,
    these would be the words: “God with us.”
    We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on the infancy of Christ.
    The greater truth of the holiday is His deity.
    More astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth
    that this promised baby is the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth! (John MacArthur, Truth for Today: A Daily Touch of God’s Grace)
34. Christmas celebrates the awesome and amazing fact that God is grander,
    wiser and more mysterious than we could have ever imagined. (Dan Schaeffer, In Search of the Real Meaning of Christmas)
35. Who can add to Christmas? The perfect motive is that God so loved the world.
    The perfect gift is that He gave His only Son.
    The only requirement is to believe in Him.
    The reward of faith is that you shall have everlasting life. (Corrie Ten Boom)
36. Christ was born in the first century, yet He belongs to all centuries.
    He was born a Jew, yet He belongs to all races.
    He was born in Bethlehem, yet He belongs to all countries. (George W. Truett)

Quotes about Serving Others at Christmas

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul tells us, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:5–7).  

During Christmas, we’re reminded of the sacrifices God made for us—and our need to remember others.

37. The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time. (Pope Benedict XVI)
38. Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home. (G.K. Chesterton, Brave New Family: G.K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family)
39. God sent a star to light the night for
    The Way, The Truth, The Life—His Son.
    He sent the Light of Life to prove His heart
    so we would invite His Son into our own.
    God has given us all the light we’ll ever
    need to find peace on earth,
    goodwill to men. (Pamela F. Dowd)
40. Blessed is
    The season which
    Engages the whole
    World in a
    Conspiracy of love. (Hamilton Wright Mabie)
41. Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the unwanted, care for the ill, love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have done unto you. (—Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
42. There is no better time than now, this very Christmas season, for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the principles taught by Jesus the Christ. It is the time to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart—and our neighbors as ourselves. (Thomas S. Monson, In Search of the Christmas Spirit)
43. Nor is it the spirit of those Christians—alas, they are many—whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves.
    The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor—spending and being spent—to enrich their fellow men, giving time, trouble, care, and concern to do good to others—and not just their own friends—in whatever way there seems need. (J.I. Packer, Knowing God)
44. We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice. (Pope Paul VI)
45. Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog. (Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew)

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