Kay Arthur — Giving the Gift of Love
What’s the first word that comes into your mind when I say “Christmas”? Is it gifts? Is it parties? Is it pain? Is it loneliness? Is it family? Is it joy? What is the first word that you associate with Christmas?
Well if Christmas is going to be everything that you dream of it being, the word that you ought to associate with Christmas, Beloved, is the word “love”, because Christmas is about love. Christmas is about, first of all, receiving the love of God, because that baby whose birth we are celebrating was God’s ultimate expression of His love.
In John 3:16 it says, “…God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son….” (John 3:16)
Jesus came in the fullness of time. He was born of a virgin. He was born without sin. He was born to die; to die for your sins and my sins so that you and I who are separated from God might be reconciled to God.
Christmas is about love, a love that reconciles, a love that takes two that are at enmity with one another and again makes them friends or brings them back. Love reconciles. It’s not God that needs to be reconciled to man, but it is man that needs to be reconciled to God.
Christmas is about love and love heals. Love salves our wounds and brings healing to us. This is what Christmas is all about. Christmas is receiving the love of God. And Christmas is in turn loving others and loving God. Now often we think about the gift that we’re going to give to our mother or our father or sister or brother or husband or wife, our kids.
And we know that the kids are so excited and we know that they cannot wait. They just cannot wait to open their presents. But Christmas is about the joy of giving to others also.
I remember when I was a little girl and my daddy smoked pipes. And what I would do is I would seek to fill his pipe stand with pipes because I knew my daddy loved pipes. And I didn’t have a lot of money. I had to work. I had to earn my own money and I had to buy my own pipe.
Nobody bought daddy’s pipe for me to give to him. So they were not treasures, but they were to me. And I remember I would sit there and I would get so excited I could hardly stand it. Why? Because I loved my daddy and I wanted to make my daddy happy.
I wanted my daddy to be thrilled with what I gave him. And of course because pipes are small and because they come in a certain size package I didn’t want daddy to know that he was getting a pipe, so I would get an assortment of boxes and I would get big boxes and smaller boxes and smaller boxes inside and sometimes I’d put books and sometimes I’d put bricks to make it look like what it wasn’t so that as he would open it up the anticipation would build and build and build until finally he would open my pipe, my pipe that said “Daddy, I love you.”
I would laugh. I would giggle. I would get so excited. He would get his pipe out. He would light it up and I would be all day long saying, “Do you like it daddy, do you like your pipe daddy?” I wanted my daddy to love what I gave him because I loved my daddy.
I want to ask you a question. Do you love your heavenly Father? You say, “Yeah, I love Him.” Does He know it? You say, “He’s God. He knows everything.”
Well let me ask you a question: Does your life express your love to God? You say, “How do I do that?” That’s what I want us to look at today. Because I want you to experience the most wonderful Christmas that you can experience.
I want us to understand what this season is all about. I want to in a sense, pardon me, I want to “milk it for all it’s worth.” I want you and I to have the true benefit of what it means to remember that this is the time when we celebrate, whether it happened at this time or not really doesn’t matter, but when we celebrate what Christmas is all аbout: the gift of God’s Son.