Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The Best Christmas Present of All?

Christmas gets closer - invading every spare moment with present wrapping, checking out the TV schedules, feeling guilty about those Christmas cards that have not yet been sent. And as it does, I've been musing on why we Christians claim, with such certainty, that Jesus is the greatest Christmas present of all.

There are two reasons, primarily, I think. The first is the standard Christian belief that God has achieved (through Jesus' death and resurrection) the way for us to live forever with God. For that to be achieved, Jesus had, first, to be born. However, whilst that is great news, it stands as essentially an item of faith, held by believers in hope and trust. It is not something which connects with most people (that is, with the majority of people who will not be in church over this Christmas period). So what other good news is there?

To answer that, we have to do a little bit of imagining. Imagine, if you will, what you would do if you were God, and had the ability to stop all wars, poverty, hunger and disease. If you did…how would you do it? Given that all these great evils are directly attributable to human action (or lack of it in the case of disease) you would have to forcibly change human nature. You would have to remove the desire for personal gain, and implant a heart of love into each human being.

But if you did so…your human beings wouldn't be human beings any more…would they? Instead, they would be robots, automatons who simply do what they are told (in this case, love one another). Their love for each other, and for you (their God) would not be real…it would something you were forcing them to do.

So God had to devise another way of encouraging us, by our own free will, to love one another. So he sent Jesus to us, to show us what God is like - to be the ultimate example of self-sacrificing love. Jesus is God's best present to us, because it is only in Jesus that we can get a clear picture of what God is like, and make a choice to live God's way…strengthened by the Spirit of God living in us. God's Christmas present of Jesus is therefore the very key which will unlock the door of hunger, war, poverty and disease…for the whole world. I can't think of a better present for the world than that…can you?

If only we would unwrap God's present, and use it!

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