Here’s my notes from this evening’s Metro Christian Centre, Carol Service (21st December, 2025).
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘And His name will be the hope of all the world’
– Matthew 12:21 (NLT)
THE MYSTERIOUS VISITOR
Each year at Christmas, a mysterious visitor comes to our house—always arriving at the exact moment the tub of Christmas chocolates is opened.
This mysterious visitor isn’t unique to our home. Oh no. Rumour has it they travel the entire nation, sneaking from living room to living room like some sort of reverse, twisted Santa Claus.
Because in every home they visit they commit the same despicable act:
They leave empty wrappers in the chocolate tub.
I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they look like. I don’t know what motivates them. All I know is how it leaves me feeling.
Whenever I open a tub of Quality Street and spot, nestled among the colourful wrappers, that glorious flash of red—promising, “Yes, there is still a strawberry cream left”—my hope soars!
But then to reach in… and discover an empty wrapper?
Well, something inside me dies.
Christmas after Christmas, this mysterious visitor appears, crushing my dreams.
It’s bad enough when it’s a tub of Quality Street or Celebrations. But two years ago, this vile individual upped the ante. They placed empty wrappers back into a box of After Eight mints. It was gruelling—pulling out envelope after envelope, having my hopes shattered again and again, like a very slow, very chocolate-based form of emotional torture.
There was one After Eight left in the entire box. It took me ten minutes to find it. Ten minutes! A chocoholic like me just can’t handle that level of disappointment. It was honestly the worst party game I’ve ever played.
CRAVINGS
The film character, Forrest Gump, quoting a lesson he had learned from his mum, famously said, ‘That life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.’
He said that to describe the variety of experience there is in one human life: there will be “chocolates” we like, alongside those we don’t like.
But life is also like a box of chocolates because there are so many empty wrappers.
For some reason this year, those empty wrappers feel like little parables—reminders of how often we reach for things in life, seeking satisfaction, meaning, hope; seeking, I suppose, something that will complete us and fulfil, and yet, often, those very same things turn out to be empty and unable to sustain us.
I’m not talking about ‘bad’ things, by the way.
I’m talking about good things. Beautiful things. Amazing things. But because of what we want those things to do, because of the hole we hope they will fill, those things become ultimate in our hearts… and then collapse under the weight of our expectation.
They disappoint—not because they are disappointing. But because they buckle beneath a hope they were never designed to carry. A burden we place upon them.
‘If I write that book, then I will feel whole.’
‘If I can marry so and so, and have this kind of home life, then I will feel complete.’
‘If I can get that kind of job … that level of comfort… that reputation…’
The list goes on. There’s no end to the things we pour our hopes into.
Even the idea of a ‘perfect Christmas’, whatever that is, comes under this burden.
But so often, if we’re honest, we find ourselves holding little more than an empty wrapper. Again, not because these things are wrong—they’re not, but because we expect them to scratch an itch they were never made to scratch.
One ancient writer said that God has “set eternity in the human heart.”(Ecclesiastes 3:11)
He was describing this craving we have that nothing seems to satisfy. And trust me when I say that this ancient writer tries to scratch that itch with everything that exists, but constantly comes up empty.
There is something in everyone of us— a deep, unrelenting, insistent hunger —that yearns for something no piece of creation can fill.
C. S. Lewis, the writer of the Narnia stories, observed the same truth. He noted that creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires also exists.
We thirst because there is water. We hunger because there is food. And so, he said, if we find in ourselves a desire nothing in this world can satisfy, then maybe—just maybe—it’s because we were made for Someone beyond the world.
Which is why the emptiness left behind by our pursuits can feel like those wrappers.
Our craving points to something.
Our hunger witnesses to Someone.
Our deep, unshakable longing whispers that we were made for the eternal God.
And into that very hunger, Jesus Christ is born.
He steps into our world of cravings offering us something real, something solid, something alive. As Jesus grew and travelled, he referred to himself in some weird and wonderful ways: ‘Living Water’, ‘The Light of the World’, and, most revealing, ‘The Bread of Life.’
Imagine describing yourself as “bread”. Imagine putting that on your C.V.
But it gets stranger: This Bread of Life—the One who can feed the hunger of every human soul—is born in Bethlehem… a name which literally means “house of bread.” And he is laid in a manger—a feeding trough.
Everything in the Christmas story insists:
This is the nourishment you’ve been aching for.
This is the One your longings have been trying to name.
This is the fullness that won’t leave you empty.
All the longings that have driven you, all the desires that nothing else has been able to satisfy, all the ache for meaning that creation cannot answer—God meets them in Jesus.
This is why the carol sings, “Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”
When Jesus steps into our emptiness —when the light falls upon our darkness, when hope walks into our hollowness—the soul finally recognises all it was made for, all it has ever wanted.
He does not leave us searching the box of chocolates for something more.
So tonight, as we sing, as we celebrate, as we remember the reason for Christmas, may we open our hands and offer God whatever wrappers we’ve been clutching—whatever we’ve been trying to feed on that simply cannot satisfy.
And may we receive, instead, the One who is:
Light for the lost.
Bread for those starved of meaning.
Worth for the weary.
Hope for the hollow.
Amen.
‘May the God of Hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.’
Romans 15:13
‘Jesus was God and man in one person, that God and man might be happy together again’
― George Whitefield
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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