Devotional Messages

DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE

I John 4:7-9 – Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.  God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. (NRSV)

When we say that Jesus is called Emmanuel – God-With-Us – it really doesn’t mean anything more or anything less than proclaiming that Love is present in our world.  In this season, as we prepare for Christmas, we try a little harder to make this obvious.  But as Christians, the calling of our baptism is to do this every day.  If we want to share God’s love with someone, there is no way to do that that doesn’t involve loving them ourselves.

The writer of First John promises us that we will have life through Christ Jesus.  But the letter is also asking us to give Jesus life through our own loving living.  When we live in love, when we share love, when we show love, that is how God is truly revealed in our midst.  And that’s really the message of Christmas, isn’t it?  That God is present among us, loving each and every one of us?

To dig a little deeper into it, Christmas even teaches us that it’s not enough to love people in the abstract.  God already loved the world before Jesus arrived on earth.  What the Incarnation – the miracle of Christmas – shows us, is that God loves us in our human specificity, each particular one of us, with all our quirks and weaknesses and gifts.  To be called to love with the love of Jesus is to love people, not in the abstract, but in the flesh, exactly how they are.

Sometimes it feels like it’s only possible to love people like that because we know God, because only God’s grace can make it possible.  People are irritating, after all; they do stupid things and they make terrible choices and they are often selfish and rude.  It would be much easier to love them in the abstract, simply because they are fellow children of God.  But Christmas calls us to reveal God by loving them as they are in real life.  And sometimes Christmas comes because we are loved just as we are too!