the word given… with just 2 days… till Christmas…
The Christmas tradition of give…
is born out of the Nativity story…
God gave Mary the blessing of bearing His Son…
she gave Him herself for His use…
Joseph gave up his reputation…
to give the Savior a flesh and blood dad…
The shepherds gave encouragement…
by going to see what the angel revealed…
And the wise men… they gave gifts…
In recent years… I’ve tried to pull back on the material…
focus more on the spiritual…
the true meaning of Christmas…
but giving gifts… has deep roots…
When I was little…
my mom made Christmas BIG…!
presents… presents… presents…
under the tree…
from Santa…
stocking-stuffers…
With both parents raised in the Great Depression…
making sure their children had more…
was important…
Jesus…
even though He should have been the center of attention…
was relegated to the shadows…
in a small hand-carved Nativity scene…
We didn’t attend church as a family…
no Christmas Eve service…
no communion…
no Nativity story read from the Bible…
But gifts… they were front and center…
so that’s how it went with my kids…
give a BIG Christmas…
Now it feels out of control…
Gifts have started piling…
None of these are from me…
my adult children… now connect Christmas… with giving gifts…
(and… Yes… these should be under the tree…
but it’s still not decorated…
and… Yes… I know it’s 2 days till Christmas…
and… Yes… it’s still messy…!)
The wise men’s giving of gifts… was an outpouring of worship… to the newborn King…
John Piper… in his daily readings for Advent… emphasizes this view…
The gifts are intensifiers of desire for Christ himself in much the same way fasting is. When you give a gift to Christ like this, it’s a way of saying something like this:
The joy that I pursue is not the hope of getting rich with things from you. I have not come to you for your things but for yourself. And this desire I now intensify and demonstrate by giving up things in the hope of enjoying you more, not the things. By giving to you what you do not need and what I might enjoy, I am saying more earnestly and more authentically, “You are my treasure, not these things.”
— John Piper, The Dawning of Indestructible Joy
The wise men didn’t give because He needed…
the wise men gave because they desired Him…
The give of Christmas…
is not about the material…
it’s about love…
because the One who started it all…
gave…
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