Interlude: Christmas is Around the Corner (part 2)

Continued from Interlude: Christmas is Around the Corner (part 1)

I subscribe to a daily devotional from Purpose Driven Life ministries started by Rick Warren, and many of its messages are real gems to me. The most recent one dated 13 Dec talks about the meaning of Christmas, and I think the author makes a very good point - its what we make of all this (i.e. the lights and glitter and everything associated with commercial Christmas) in our hearts that counts. I've copied and appended it at the end of this Blog entry.

The message at the end also reminds us that it is a good time as any to reflect on whether there is any room for Jesus in our lives. This reminds me of a beautiful song called "No Room for Jesus" that a wonderful brother in my church wrote and sang for the congregation. His song brought many congregation members, including myself, to tears because our own unhappiness, needs and worries often take precedence before God, and we often allow worldly things to fill up our hearts and lives until there is really "no room for Jesus".

A good friend of mine sent me a devotional message on Mountainwings.com about making room for God in our lives too. A lecturer was giving a lesson on life to his students. He took a bagful of golf balls and an empty cookie jar, poured the balls into the jar until it was filled to its brim, and asked his class whether there is still room. Many of them said no. He then took out a bagful of sand and started pouring the contents into the jar of golf balls. The sand quickly filled up the spaces in between the balls. The lecturer asked his students the same question, and some of them said no. Finally, he took 2 cups of coffee and emptied the beverage into the cookie jar. He explained to his students that the jar represented our lives, and the golf balls represented the things that take priority in our lives, while the sand symbolised insignificant things or things we can do without. If we had allowed the sand to fill the jar there wouldnt be enough room for the golf balls, so its important that we get our priorities right. As a believer, God should be our priority.

What about the 2 cups of coffee, someone asked. The lecturer replied that no matter how busy our lives are, there is always room for 2 cups of coffee. ;-)

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Turning All That Glitters into Gold
by John Fischer

In the little town of Bethlehem, the most important birth in all of human history took place on what we now consider the first Christmas. It was sparsely attended by some bleating farm animals and a handful of shepherds who wouldn’t have been there had not the sky lit up with a multitude of heavenly hosts, praising God and inviting the shepherds to the stable. What an invitation! With the exception of that outburst, however, no one else knew. Oh yes, there were some astrologers from the east that figured out what was going on by studying the stars and some ancient manuscripts, but they didn’t make it to town until at least a year or two later when the baby was a child. Why such an uneventful welcome for such an auspicious event?

It’s God’s way. He’s always been quiet about His work on earth. “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift was given/So God imparts to human hearts, the blessings of His heaven.” He’s even pretty quiet about the way He works in our lives. Silently He came into the world; silently He comes into our hearts. No fanfare. No welcoming committee. God has never been into self-promotion. He lets His work speak for itself.

And His work would be you and me. Yes, believers are the result of Christ’s coming. It is all about good news and glad tidings for all people. A Savior has been born and He has been born for us. Or as the angel announced it: “The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born tonight in Bethlehem, the city of David” (Luke 2:11 NLT)!

It occurs to me there are two ways to take all the fanfare and glitter of this season. We can see it as the over-commercialism of Christmas, or we can take all the lights, and gifts, and decorations, and parties, and bells, and carols, and Christmas specials on TV—even Santa and reindeer in the front yard—and bank them all as celebrations of what we know to be the true meaning of Christmas: the birth of Christ. We can even take the conversion of old Scrooge as the joy of new life and forgiveness of sins.

There’s no law against sanctifying the secularization of Christmas in your own heart and mind. It’s what we make of all this in our hearts that counts. Every single light can represent another soul secured in eternity as the result of what Christ has accomplished.

There was no room available for the Son of God when He came the first time. Let’s make sure there’s room in our hearts this Christmas, and don’t let anyone take away what is good about the glad tidings of Christ’s birth!