christmas

When you__e rearranging the furniture to make way for the decorations and the tree, make sure you rearrange your heart to make room for the Savior of Mankind.

[It's Not About You, Mr. Santa Claus,] is a fun read and a twist on Christmas, because it does involve Santa Claus and Jesus, and it doesn__ say that Santa Claus is bad, but it__ the child explaining to Santa Claus the true reason for the season is Jesus.

To strategize a rescue mission irrefutably capable of saving every human being is leagues beyond our ability to comprehend, and enormous beyond any resource we possess to execute. And to embark upon just such a mission fully knowing that without our death the mission will fall to failure is bravery of the greatest sort imaginable. Yet, that is exactly what Christmas is.

To get where you want to go, the first question you always have to answer is Where am I? ... We only find out where we are when we find out where He is. We only find ourselves... when we find Him.

For once in my life maybe I ought to actually think about taking God at His word, and in doing so to suddenly find myself riotously welcoming the rather shocking reality that Christmas is truly everything that He says it is.

Christmas has a deeper significance to followers of Jesus. It__ not all about the gifts underneath Christmas trees or the elaborate meals served in extravagantly decorated homes. Christmas is the season of Immanuel. We celebrate the good news that He is near, that He cares for us, and that He transforms lives. His presence was the greatest present God gave mankind. May we be present carriers of that presence!

What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love.

We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort.

Unto you is bornin the city of Davida Savior for all.

Christ did not come to earth simply to be our moral teacher. If that were His only mission, He could have come as He did in former times, as the Angel of the Lord, without our flesh and blood to encumber Him. Instead, He had to become like us so that He could raise us up to be like Him.

In Christ__ first coming, He implemented a rescue plan conceived in the mind of God before the foundation of the world. He did not come to promote holiday cheer, boost end-of-year sales, or serve as the central figure in a Nativity scene. He came to save sinners. To save sinners, Christ had to put away what makes people sinners__amely, sin.

It__ not so much about writing the story of Christmas itself, as ingenious as it is. In reality, it__ much more about writing the story of Christmas into the story of life so that it will become the story of life.

This is the wonder of Christmas, that in the solitary form of an impoverished infant God has handed me everything that I could never create so that I can be everything that I could never be.

The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth.

The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.

Perfect majesty that deliberately chose to be born into abject poverty, walk a road of perpetual poverty, and be unjustly executed in the raw nakedness of poverty is utterly ludicrous unless I realize that this is the single and sole way that God can reach me in the suffocating poverty that I myself have created.

What we__e searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.

If God annihilates or deflects or creates a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born