Christmas, it comes the same time every year…
We anticipate it, and we can also be anxious about it.
We huddle around trees, treats and toys — and make trips to the malls for gifts to shop in galore.
And then there’s also some of us quietly hoping to hop over hurdles and heal from hurricanes, this persistent hungering for some heart resurrections, some hope revivals...
What do we really want this Christmas?
Is there something of today’s Christmas that will carry us through to tomorrow’s Christmas, leaving us full of love, joy and hope?
We’re desperate sick for the hound of Heaven to break forth so glorious that we’re carried into the coming year feeling secure, feeling assured, overflowing with laughs from our hearts that reverberate louder than whatever troubles may come, this is the Christmas I want, and the Christmas we all want…emanating joy real, and deep and lasting.
And it’s our lack of sight that prevents our true seeing, but joy in Christmas that lingers long and lasts deep always calls for worship that sees Christ as our greatest Gift.
Maybe the Christmas that we really need then is the Christmas that sees —
God giving us a Gift – the greatest gift of gifts, this Gift of Himself, this gift of God, so that we can always live full and abundant because of that One Gift that keeps giving of Himself, to us, to us.
The Greatest becoming the Littlest, the most Sovereign becoming the One Suffering, and the Highest our lowliest…so that we can always exult in Him no matter our circumstance, and be raised even though we may be low and small in this world, and always, always find the reason to joy and the heart to love.
Love extending Himself to the undeserving of you and me, so that the sinful can be saved, and our every inadequacy falling into His sufficiency, our every heartbreaks finding complete healing, because He is the singular song our hearts are singing for and the story of Christmas, it’s our story of how Love finds us, woos us and wins us.
It’s our story of how in God’s genealogy, we are all engrafted into His family tree — because out of that single shoot of Jesse that looks like a stump of no growth sprouts a glory that transforms human hearts, and changes the line of history forever.
Christmas can remake the song of our soul – morphing our tragedy into triumph, and how out of the story of the King becoming a babe, that branch grew into a wooden rugged cross that offers our own path back to God. Christmas, o how He’d do anything and everything —- to save us.
We can take a moment and revel in the wonders of the shoot, the seed, the small, and realise the wonder of Love so strong, so unbreakable, so fervent — for us.
So let’s enjoy this Christmas revelling in the greatest gift of all — *Jesus*, and seeing how all our struggles can find surrender in the surround of a Sovereign, loving Saviour — *Jesus*.
Let’s make Christmas our homecoming – a slow seeping of hearts savouring grace, us continually ravished in the greatest wonder, because this Christmas — it’s more than decking our homes with decorations that glitter, but donning our hearts with dreams that matter — a Savour born for us, so that whoever we are, wherever we may be –— we can always be found, we can know that we’re always held, and that we’ll never be undone in Him.
Merry Merry Christmas!