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"Aiming to glorify God by calling and equipping people to be fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ" |
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December 2007 - Focus Magazine |
“Good things come in small packages” – so the saying goes. This Christmas Harrods make this same statement to entice us to buy Crème de la Mer lip balm with a solid silver lid (I’ll spare you the details of the price tag!) Harrods may simply be trying to encourage us to make this exclusive purchase at their store – but they have also unwittingly stated a great truth of the Christmas message |
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Christmas is all about a small package, a baby. Not just any baby, but Jesus – “the Word” who is God. “The Word made flesh” as the apostle John puts it. What is so amazing about this small package is that, “through Him all things were made” (John 1:3). That is an astonishing truth about the One who came at Christmas. It is estimated that there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Our sun is 150 trillion miles from the centre of our galaxy. Our galaxy is just one of a cluster of 30 galaxies. Altogether there are over 100 billion galaxies and each galaxy has over 100 billion stars. At Christmas, the One who created this vast universe, became a baby and lived among us. Good things do indeed come in small packages. That alone is enough to blow our minds, but why He came is even more astounding and that is the part of Christmas I failed to understand for years. Understanding why Jesus came to this tiny blue green planet is what makes this little package so remarkable and so valuable. It is grasping that Christmas and Easter are inextricably linked that finally convinces us why the Christmas message is so valuable. When someone explained it to me for the first time, it was then that Christmas became a truly amazing time of the year. Suddenly it all made sense – not just Christmas, but the whole of life. Of course, through the years, many have discovered what Christmas is all about. Charles Wesley tells us of Jesus in his carol, Hark the herald angels sing: Mild He lays His glory by, Sadly, this Christmas, so many will fail to see that Jesus is “the Word made flesh”. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognise Him (John 1:10). On the Harrods website I typed in “Jesus” and clicked “search” to see if there is any reference to Him on their site. There isn’t. Let’s not be those who fail to recognise Him and so do not see all that Christmas is truly about. Happy ChristmasDavid Williams - EEFC Focus Magazine December 2007 |