Tuesday, December 25, 2012

The Perfect Gift of Love

Well, it's Christmas!  The best day of the year... not because of presents, or the wonderful Hallmark Christmas movies, or the cold weather if you are anywhere outside of the south, but because on this day, God came to Earth in the form of baby Jesus so that we would be released 33 years later from sin.  The miracle of Jesus' life here on Earth is one that I cannot fully comprehend. Yet, I do know that my God loves me.  He showed it by sending His son to save me from all of the bad stuff that I do, think and say.  And that love is so undeserved.  It's the perfect example of how we should love one another -- even when the other person doesn't deserve it one bit... because ultimately, that is what God has done for us.  He sacrificed for us so that we could choose to accept that enormous gift and live here on Earth with hope and one day live with Him in Heaven!

My pastor passed this on to me from one of his sermons a few weeks ago.  I do not know where it came from, but I think it goes well with how we should love one another on this day and every day. 

People who love each other need to have something they can do for each other, and it will need to be something necessary, not something frivolous. You can't carry out a relationship on the basis of Christmas and anniversary and birthday presents. It won't work.
You do needful, useful things for each other, and that seems to me to be the way that a union is made...You're being made a partner by your partner's needs and the things that you're required to do to help...Love is not just a feeling; it's a practice, something you practice whether you feel like it or not. If you have a relationship with anybody - a friend, a family member, a spouse - you have to understand the terms of that relationship to do things for those people, and you do them whether you feel like it or not. If you don't it's useless...
This is what you learn as soon as you become a farmer, for instance. Once you get into a relationship with even so much as a vegetable garden, you realize that you have to do the work whether you want to or not. You may have got into it because of love, but there are going to be days when you are sick and you're going to have to do your work anyway. With animals, the work is even more inescapable. There's no way out if you have a milk cow, no reprieve...She makes the milk and you've got to go get it.

God's love for us was shown perfectly in what He did for us and continues to do for us each day -- even though we don't deserve it.  My prayer is that on this day, we would all remember what it truly means to love.

May we remember the true meaning of Christmas and that we have a God who loves us more than we can even imagine.

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