Friday, December 11, 2015
I think that most of you who read this blog will agree that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if Christ wasn’t in it, and although today it means different things to different people, we wouldn’t even have a Christmas if Jesus had not been born in a humble stable in the little town of Bethlehem over two thousand years ago. Have you ever considered, however, why God chose to come to Earth in the form of a baby and what can we learn about the Christmas story?
Without a doubt, God gave us His Son because He loved us. The Bible teaches us that Jesus was the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. (Rev. 13:8) In other words, even before Adam and Eve, God’s plan included that several thousand years later His Son would come into the world and thirty three years after His birth, He would hang on the cross of Calvary to be the payment for men’s sins. The Son who never sinned, whom He loved so dearly, would be paying the price for a sin laden mankind. That’s how much God loved us!
People today can call it what they wish, but it was God who set the wheels of love in motion. Christmas is a time for gifts. People give them, or should anyway, because they love the persons they are giving them too. Yet, it started with God when He gave us the Greatest Gift ever. The Bible says in 1 John 4:19, that “we love Him because He first loved us.” Consequently, we give because He first gave. A great philosopher and humanitarian of the past, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, confessed that He began to do things for others when a certain someone once gave him a very precious and meaningful gift, one in which no monetary value was involved. When he and his wife were being transported one day to another prisoner-of-war camp, they were struggling with their heavy baggage on a scorching hot day. Almost out of nowhere, a poor crippled man Dr. Schweitzer had treated in the camp, came to help them with their heavy load. The man could hardly walk himself, yet he walked side by side with them until they boarded their train. His was love and devotion created by thankfulness. Family and friends, the idea to do good things for others because others have done good things for us, did not begin with a Coca Cola TV commercial; it began with God. Love is a Christmas essential. I pray that it will define your Christmas this year.
Memory Verse for the week: (Romans 14:4) “Who are you (we) to judge someone else's servant? To his own Master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.”
