By the time Christmas rolls around, most of us know exactly what to expect. The songs are the same ones we’ve heard for years. The images feel second nature. Even the story comes wrapped up neatly, familiar and reassuring, asking very little of us beyond showing up.
Singer/songwriter Matt Redman is not a fan of that version of Christmas.
Redman, one of the most influential figures in modern worship music, has been writing songs that are now embedded in church life around the world. 10,000 Reasons alone has been translated into dozens of languages and sung by millions, often by people who may not know his name but know his words by heart. That kind of success can easily lead to certainty and formula. Instead, Redman has found himself drawn back to the parts of faith that resist being made comfortable.
“Sometimes we get so familiar with the story that it stops feeling wondrous,” Redman said in a recent interview with Relevant Magazine podcast. “And when that happens, we lose something important.”
For Redman, Christmas matters, not because it reassures us, but because it unsettles us. The central claim of the season refuses to behave. God arrives as a baby. Glory enters the world quietly. Angels deliver the most important announcement in history not to centres of power, but to shepherds standing in a field that smelled of animals.
“It’s full of tension,” Redman said. “And that tension matters.”
He often speaks about mystery, not as something vague or abstract, but as paradox. A God who is overwhelming in power yet startlingly close. A king who rules all things and kneels in the dirt. A holiness that does not keep its distance.
“He’s the God who thunders and whispers,” Redman said. “That’s not something to solve. It’s something to hold.”
That posture runs against the grain of much contemporary culture, which prizes clarity, certainty, and quick conclusions. Redman doesn’t reject explanation or teaching, but he believes they are insufficient on their own.
“There’s a danger in only emphasizing one side of who God is,” he said. “If you only focus on closeness without greatness, the closeness stops feeling remarkable.”
Christmas, in his view, holds both together. The transcendent becomes imminent. The unreachable steps into human life from the inside, not as an idea but as a presence. It disrupts expectations rather than settling them.
That disruption feels especially sharp this year in Australia. As the Christmas season arrives, it does so against the lingering shock and grief of the Bondi Beach attacks and the Jewish community targeted there. The sense of safety many Australians took for granted has been shaken. The season’s promises of peace and goodwill sit uneasily alongside fear, grief, and unresolved trauma.
In that context, a tidy, sentimental Christmas rings hollow. A story that insists God enters vulnerability, violence, and human fragility feels far more honest.
Redman sees a broader pattern at work. “We live in a moment that really values certainty. Strong opinions. Clear sides. Quick conclusions.” Christmas resists that impulse. It introduces contradiction. It invites people not to rush toward answers, but to linger.
His approach to worship reflects the same instinct. He often describes his songs as needing to do two things at once: tell the story and create space to respond.
“I don’t want a song to feel like a lecture,” he said. “I want it to feel like a place.”
That sensibility shapes how he thinks about Christmas music as well. Not as seasonal narration, but as an invitation back into awe. A way of reopening a story people think they already understand.
“The job isn’t to make it clearer,” Redman said. “It’s to help people see it again.”
Over time, he has come to believe that wonder is not optional to faith. Without it, worship becomes functional and predictable. Christmas, at its best, interrupts that rhythm. It refuses to stay tidy. It insists that something impossible happened and does not hurry to make it comfortable.
When asked what he hopes people do with that tension, Redman is direct. “I hope they don’t rush past it,” he said. “I hope they sit with it.”
When Christmas no longer unsettles us, when it no longer interrupts our assumptions or rearranges our expectations, it hasn’t simply lost its mystery and its power to change us for the better.
