Dwight Fletcher | Christmas breeze - gifts of Christmas - Part III

Christmas is just around the corner and everywhere you look, there is a shop or a vendor with a beautiful arrangement of goods enticing you to purchase. But finding the perfect gift for a friend or loved one can be a challenging. There are so many things involved in finding the perfect gift. And as we mentioned last week, there are specific criteria for the perfect gift:

- The perfect gift should be 'expensive'.

- Meet the need of the recipient.

- Be given with the right motive.

God has always wanted to give us His best and that's because He wants the best for us. This may be how we feel about some of the people in our lives. In fact, we all may have family and friends we feel are deserving of the best gifts. On the other hand, we have other persons whom we feel less inclined to spend a lot on. God, however, in His love, doesn't make these distinctions. His love for all of us made Him send us the perfect gift in His Son Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is expensive. He meets our need for eternal life and He was given with the right motive. Last week, we said that if we apply these three criteria for a perfect gift, we will find that the gift of God in Jesus surpasses our human expectations.

JESUS THE GIFT OF GOD

Today, let's look at the last criteria of Jesus.

3. Jesus was given because of love.

The bible makes it so clear that God loves us, Jeremiah 31:3 (NIV) says, "I have loved you with an everlasting love ...". God could not love you any more or any less than He loves you right now. Some of us have a hard time understanding God's love. We are of the belief that God's love is dependent on the 'goodness' of our walk of faith. We think that we have to do something to make God love us more and we struggle in our relationship with God. But the Apostle John says, "We love because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19 (NIV). It is God who initiates this love.

Because we have a hard time understanding the love of God, we struggle in our relationship with Him. We believe that God's love is dependent on our performance, thinking we must do something to make Him love us more. Here's the good news again. The Bible says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

God gave His Son to save us and to show how much He loves us. "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." John 15:13 (NIV). This amazing generosity and compassion reflect God's heart and Jesus demonstrated the depth and intensity of God's unfathomable love, by His willingness to die for us.

True love takes action and at Christmas we celebrate the birth of baby Jesus who was born to die for the sins of the world. God has given us the perfect gift heaven can offer. So, how do we respond to such precious gift?

By accepting God's love gift to us ... Jesus.

Christmas is all about God's love. So, as we celebrate with family and friends this Christmas, allow our joy and peace to come from Jesus Christ, God's perfect gift to us. He is expensive, the solutions to our sin problems and was given with a pure motive. Accepting this perfect gift from God is not dependent on what we do, how good or bad we have been. God loves us and show us this love through His Son's sacrifice on the cross.

"This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." 1 John 4:10 (NIV)