Happy New Year Church! I hope you had a great time of celebrating the birth of Christ and I pray that is daily celebration on our lives and not just a season of celebration. I was thinking during Christmas just how different things are for my family now then they were when I was growing up. Many things are the same but a lot has changed.
The most obvious difference is the faces that are no longer in the pictures. One of the best things about the holidays is being with the people you love the most, and for all of us, some of the ones that we love the most are no longer here and that leaves a definite hole in the holidays. They’re still great, the holidays, they’re just different then they were.
Shopping is another thing that is completely different than it used to be. I talked to several people over the past few weeks that had their Christmas shopping completely done and never entered the mall or a store of any kind. They did it all online!! That’s definitely different! Ordering things when I grew up meant calling the toll free number and being on hold for hours to get your item.
Or, I can remember sitting down with the Columbia House Records order form and picking out my 12 cassette tapes for a penny, all I had to do was buy 1 at regular price! That’s 13 tapes for the price of 1 plus a penny! What a deal!
I can also remember sitting down with the Sears catalogue, the one that weighed about 30 pounds and was 3 inches thick and going through all the pages and circling what I wanted for Christmas. My parents would give us all a different color marker and tell us to circle what we were wishing for so they would know what to buy us for Christmas.
Kids today don’t need a Sears catalogue, they have the Internet and their high tech toys to cruise the information highway to identify their holiday “wants.” But “back in the day” it was the Sears catalogue that helped us answer the seasonal question: “If you could have anything for Christmas, what would you ask for?”
Which brings me to as you that question - “If you could have one thing in the world, what would it be?”
This is the question that Solomon had to answer and he asked for wisdom. And God gave it to him. But by the end of his life he had accumulated more and more: more gold, more horses, more wives. He had it all and still wanted more. In the midst of all these gifts he lost sight of the Giver. He turned away from God and lost it all.
That is the direct opposite example of King Jesus! He showed us a completely different path to follow. See, King Jesus had it all and He gave it all!! He gave it all for us! He showed us that in the Christmas season, or any season for that matter, you can guard yourself from the tyranny of too much stuff by giving. Simply give so that others can simply live. That’s what the King born as a baby in the manger did.
And my wish? That you visit the manger and find him.
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