Thoughts to Enrich and Enliven Your Holiday Celebrations

The gift of Christmas (the gift of God’s Son) empowers us to do all of what we were designed to do, but will fail to God unless God empowers us to do it. It is the liberation from everything that we were ‘not’ designed to be and not designed to do. It is the opportunity and the power to finally, finally be our authentic selves. And then, how about the durability of Christmas? These things that Christmas does…but how long do they last? “Have we ever consider the boldness of Christmas? For to craft such a daring story and to do so in a manner that it is sufficiently sturdy to stand up under the relentless scrutiny that is certain to be brought to bear against such a story is boldness indeed. And when God pens a story He does so not fearing scrutiny, but inviting as much of it as any one of us can muster up, for God does nothing that is not bold. Such is God and such is Christmas.” What God writes and what God does has no expiration date attached to it. There’s no last page. No period. What He writes and what He does will never find an end in itself. He’s the Creator of eternal stuff, and only eternal stuff. This stuff lasts forever. And then finally, does it really transform, because a lot of things say that they transform, but they don’t. Does Christmas transform right down to the bottom of everything that needs to be transformed? Does it really change everything? Does it really make everything new? And if so, if it really does, why do so many people just walk past it? Think about this: “One of the things that vexes me to the point of near insanity is understanding the message of Christmas and realizing the potency of this message to transform the worst of our lives so that we can become the best of our ourselves, to shift the momentum of entire cultures so that the world is brilliantly enriched by each instead of destroyed by all, and to handily touch the hem of history itself so that history is changed in the touching. And while all of these are ours for the taking, I continue to watch the mindless hoards trudge past these things in order to embrace everything that is not the ‘everything’ of these gifts. And so I pray that God would grant them a heart ready to be captured by the ‘everything’ of Christmas.” Don’t miss Christmas anymore. Don’t. Don’t miss the immensity of what God did, and what God continues to do. Get out of your rigid and confined thinking. Look at what Christmas truly is and what it truly does. Let this Christmas be the beginning of a ‘forever’ transformation in your life. Here’s wishing you and yours all the power of this incredible gift. __________________________________________________________________________________

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