Skip to main content

Christmas Grace


                The Season of Christmas is not over for the church.  We still have much to think about and much to celebrate.  The Twelve Days of Christmas, also known as Christmastide, is celebrated in the church from December 25 through January 5.  Christmas isn’t officially over until January 6 when the Feast of the Epiphany is celebrated.  I heard a new Christmas Anthem that opened my heart to the reality of Christmas.  It is entitled Christmas Grace, and the songwriter wrote it for her granddaughter.  In it she tells of the wonder of Christ.  One line in the song states:
Grace to share our frailty, understand our fragile lot; Jesus laid aside His power to be helped, trained, and taught.  To know the sting of hunger, feel the pain of grief and loss, God’s Son allowed Himself to be born for us!  He traded heaven’s majesty, He left His glorious throne for wood and hay and rubble, as hell of flesh and bone.  The Lord Almighty locked in a single time and place.  This is Christmas Grace! (Ruth Elaine Schram, The Lorenz Publishing Company, 2005)
You may be putting away your Christmas decorations, but it is not time to put away your Christmas lessons.  Understanding Christmas grace should carry on throughout the year.
One thing I can guarantee is that if you don’t focus on the Christmas grace you will never fully conceive the grace of Christmas.  John 1:14 says, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.  Christmas—Jesus coming to live like one of us—is full of grace. 
Grace is about humility.  We surrender to the wonder that God could do what we couldn’t do for ourselves by sending His Son Jesus.  Grace is realizing that our very best is far from enough.  Even if I have led a pretty good life, pay my taxes, and give to the poor, I’m still too far from holy. 
God’s grace amazes me.  He overcomes my inadequacies by offering me clemency.  If God can be so generous to offer such compassion, how can I not offer this grace to others in the coming year?  We won’t get enough at Christmas if we don’t get a heart that is stretched to offer greater forgiveness for those who let us down. 
My Christmas lessons are not really learned until I am overwhelmed by the grace that Christmas reveals.  Christmas is about the favor of God on humanity.  It is an invitation to not only celebrate a birthday of a baby 2000 years ago but also to celebrate birth into the family of God.  John the Evangelist learned this lesson of grace so fully that he boldly proclaimed that he was the disciple who Jesus loved.  The grace of Christmas isn’t only for disciples.  It is for you and me.  At Christmas we celebrate that we have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. That lesson is a life transforming lesson!
Copyright © 2011.  Deborah R. Newman www.teatimeforyoursoul.com  All Rights Reserved.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th
Post a Comment
Read more

A Pilgrimage that Started with Tears

                Who would think I would shed tears deciding to set out on a wonderful journey that I have longed to take for many years?   Before I was ready to fully accept God’s invitation for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I had to journey to a place of agreement between what my soul wanted and what the Lord wanted for me.   For years I have been declining opportunities to travel to Israel—not because I didn’t want to go but because I wanted to go with my husband by my side.   I know that God could have arranged that for me, but instead He asked me to accept that He wanted me to be willing to go and leave everything behind.   When I was asked to make a decision about going on a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, God gave me this verse in answer to my prayer -- Debi, observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess (Deuteronomy 11:8).   I decided through tears that I would go on
2 comments
Read more

The Troubled Christian Life

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness.  I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit
Post a Comment
Read more