Years ago I speaking with a young man and I asked him what he knew about Christmas and what it meant to him. He seemed rather puzzled by the question and just spoke about love, family and gifts. The startling truth about this is that this young man (in his mid-twenties) had no understanding regarding the real origin and reality of Christmas. His only tie to Christmas was one of emotion. It causes me to wonder how many have such a shallow and vain view of the most significant holiday known to man.
Along this same vein I bring to your attention how this world has such a vacuous view of love. I am afraid that to most people love is little more than an emotional tie that we hold to one another. And some of you will be surprised and say, “well most certainly that is what love is”. Years ago a woman came into my office to announce that she had decided to divorce her husband. This couple had a wonderful family, four children and a heritage of over twenty years together. I was just flabbergasted! I ask her why she would make such a choice and her response was that she just didn’t love her husband any longer. Her view obviously was that this emotional sense that she once had was now gone and its absence was clear notification that a divorce was now incumbent.
Love is not, nor has it ever been, an emotion. Love is a commitment to devotion and sacrifice that finds its origin in a very special truth or objective. It was mankind’s plight of eternal damnation and God’s choice to remedy that by the gift of His Son that determined his love to us. This is the concrete truth about Christmas. Our response to that is huge parts of gratitude, relief and a sense of safety that cannot really be measured. I am so grateful that God’s devotion to man is not found in a haphazard emotion that flutters upon occasion through His heart, but rather is an understanding of our plight and a commitment to make a way of escape for us. This is the love of God:
1 John 4:10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
The “warmth” of Christmas lies in the realization that God cared enough to send His very best!
