While Christmas is New – Sunday, December 04, 1983
The Christmas season is upon us, the pines filled with their suggestive fragrance, the holly berries still red and plump. There is yet time to think, before we become hopelessly sucked into the frenzy, what we want Christmas, this year, to be.
“For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son,”1 and we have marveled for centuries that He who created the world would come to find a place in it—that He would condescend to feel what we feel, cry in the loneliness of earth’s dark night and taste our tears.
But perhaps the central message of His life is that He wants us to feel what He feels: an outpouring of love for this earth and every soul in it.
The cause of misery for most of us is, after all, that we are without enough affection, empty, that we look on the world and others with a hollow heart squeezed dry of its life blood. People are, too often, means to an end for us. Or they are obstacles in the way as we rush down city streets or battle for parking spots.
To the Lord, each one is dear, and He is full of joy and compassion. As Truman Madsen said, “The spectrum of affection presently limited in us, is filled out fully in Him.”
We know that the best moments of our lives are when we suddenly swell with love for another. The Lord’s life suggests that there can be more of such moments and deeper ones, that we now live only on the borders of all the happy ways there are to feel.
So, with Christmas coming, let us seek to feel as the Lord feels, look at the winter world and all who hurry through it with new affection. May this season not be a monument to materialism, but a chance to remember the Savior in the best possible way. May it be a time when we can serve one of His children and try to understand what He feels for them.
1 New Testament, John 3:16
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December 04, 1983
Broadcast Number 2,833