Christmas is our most important holiday, and its literature is correspondingly rich. Yet until now no adequate bundle of Christmas treasures in poetry and prose has found its way onto the Internet for Winter, Christmas, the birth of Christ, Santa Claus, and so much more..Christmas is God’s Giving
Before me is a little story written by Robert Sylvester. It reads: “The Salvation Army always has a tough time getting the right pictures to be used for each coming Christmas and the blizzard in New York on the first day of spring this year gave them a wonderful break. The Army hurried out, found a pretty Salvation Army lassie and draped her in a red cape, broke out a standard tripod and kettle and set it up in the snow on Fifth Avenue with the sign, ‘Give a Happy Christmas.’ They figured to get some good advertising and promotion pictures for next Christmas. It got them. It also got two haif-dollars, four quarters, three dimes, seven nickels and three pennies -a total of $2.68-from passersby still thinking of Christmas on the first day of spring.”
But… why?
Why should there be a Christmas at all?
Why did God want to do all this for us, in the first place? Why? He didn’t have to, you know!
You have to go back to the Bible to find the reason for it-and it isn’t hard to find. This Bible was written by many men who believed in God, who prayed to God for help and understanding in their bitter, loveless world, and then listened quietly with all their minds and hearts for God to speak the truth to them. Now, God made their world and their earth with all its beauties; He was lavish with natural beauty as He finished it off, and when it was done it was perfect, and I’m sure He enjoyed looking at it. But He had something more than beauty to lavish upon His creation: He had loved to give. He wanted someone like Himself, who could talk to Him, love Him and obey Him by enjoying this beautiful world in the way that God intended him to-and, of course, since God designed it all, He knew the best way. So God made man in the pattern of Himself and then told man that he could have this whole wide, beautiful world. What a Christmas present that was!
The reason God made man was that man might rule the earth, for God had all of heaven and He isn’t selfish. This was a real Christmas.
God was so loving and generous that He gave man a mind like His, to think with and to decide things for himself; He gave man the superb, priceless gift of reason, for He wanted man to search for Him and love Him because he wanted to, and not because he didn’t know any better. Man’s mind is the gift of God.
Then God saw that man, in his perfect earth, was lonely-because, although man could hear God, he couldn’t see Him; because God, His Son and the Holy Spirit could be heard but not seen. He had formed man of the dust of the earth, so man was “of the earth, earthy.” But God was not content to leave him like that. He breathed into man the breath of life, and from that moment on he was a living soul; so the spiritual side of man too is the gift of God, the eternal Giver of every good thing.
Then, seeing that man was still lonely for a mate in his earthly paradise, God made woman, so that man could be happier and so that God could enjoy them both!
Yes, Christmas is always. It was back there in Eden, with God giving, giving, giving…
