Skip to main content

Radical Love at Christmas

            It is heartwarming to see the overwhelming demonstration of love that brews during the Christmas season.  News reporters focus on stories of the kindness of strangers and communities pulling together to make sure that no one goes without a Christmas gift in between the never ending accounts of crimes and catastrophes.

            It’s deemed newsworthy that soldiers are reunited with their families on Christmas Eve.  Food banks and homeless shelters are flooded with volunteers.  Otherwise unconcerned citizens make efforts to smile and greet one another.  Love fills the atmosphere at Christmas and brings joy to the season.

            The radical love that produced Christmas is bittersweet.  Christmas began because of the separation of Jesus Christ from His Father as He came to earth as a baby.  I have never imagined what that separation felt like more than this Christmas when I am separated by heaven and earth from my beloved husband.    Our separation is my hope.  I know that heavenly living is what I was created for, and I long to join him there.  It was totally opposite when God the Father and God the Son were separated by heaven and earth.  Their separation stung with spiritual harshness.  While we recreate babies in a manger under the glow of a Christmas star, God the Father and God the Son faced the full force of man’s sin and the radical love that recreated the possibility of holiness once again. Ruth Myers describes is so beautifully using God’s word in her Book 31 Days of Praise.

I love You, Father because You first loved me and sent Your Son to atone for my sins.  And I stand amazed that Jesus, who by nature had always been God, did not cling to His rights as Your equal…that he laid aside all His privileges, to be born as a human being…that He totally humbled Himself, submitting to the death of a common criminal, enduring infinite humiliation and pain…that on the cross You laid on Him the compressed weight of all my sin and guilt and shame, all of my griefs and sorrows, and He became sin for me, dying the death I deserved (1 John 4:10; Phil. 2:6-9; Is. 53:3-12; 2 Cor. 5:21)[i]. 

Our affection for God transforms our spiritual lives.  As we open our souls to the love of God that is poured into our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5); we begin to pray and stay connected to His life-changing love.  The Advent Season is a wonderful time to think about God’s great love demonstrated in the most radical form by becoming man, to live and die and rise again to pay for the sins that marked you for meaningless death.  Let your soul ascend through the love that penetrates the world at Christmas by acknowledging the source of this love.  The more you love Him, the greater you will feel His presence in your life and the more transformed to His likeness you will become.  Embrace the radical love poured over the universe at Christmas.

 Copyright © 2012.  Deborah R. Newman www.teatimeforyoursoul.com  All Rights Reserved.


[i] Ruth Myers, 31 Days of Praise, (Random House, Colorado Springs, CO: 1994), p. 46.
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 Missing Tribe of Dan

            The reason I love studying the Bible with a group of people is that they teach me things I don’t know.   I love it when I don’t know the answer to a question.   That is how I learn.   So when someone recounted the ugly tail of Dan’s idolatry in Judges 18 concluding with the passage in Judges 18:30-31 :   There the Danites set up for themselves the idol, and Jonathan son of Gershom, the son of Moses, and his sons were priests for the tribe of Dan until the time of the captivity of the land.   They continued to use the idol Micah had made, all the time the house of God was in Shiloh. I wanted to know if that could possibly be true that the Danites never ever worshiped God!   How could that be?             Before I had a chance to settle that question, someone in the class read the passage from Revelation 7 where the tribe of Dan was omitted.   I never considered that!   I never realized that a whole tribe of Israel was not found in the New Testament.   What could that
2 comments
Read more