Are you Ready For Christmas?

Are you ready for Christmas? It seems like we just got the stuff from last year put away, and it's time to get it all out again! Get a tree, get it all dressed up, get ready to bake some cookies and pies (Mrs. Smith's pies are real good!), go over the list again - don't miss Uncle Fred and Aunt Sadie this year! The house will soon be filled with the delicious aroma of pies, cookies, ham and beef roasts mixed with pine or spruce. All this is good. Christmas is, after all, a season of celebration. And how can we have a decent celebration without an ample offering of food, aromas, gifts, and relatives? The down part of all this good is that the temptation is to get so caught up in gifts and food that the real meaning and message of Christmas is lost. The celebrating can trump the reason for the celebrating. Christmas means that the eternal God has entered our time-space earth and mangled world to bring good news of healing and restoration. But not just to bring good news. Actually to be the good news that He brings. He has brought an external word, a message from outside our minds and hearts. One we did not make up, one most of us in fact resisted, in some cases for years. We cannot ascend to God on our own, He came down to us. And not in a way that any human mind would've expected. He came dressed as a little baby, born in a cave used as a stable, laid in a feeding trough for animals! The gospel is wildly improbable - but it happened! We know it as not a story made up from human imagination, for no one would have had the eternal God come to us in that way. If this God in Jesus Christ does not live in your heart, invite Him in. He is eager to be your Lord and Savior, but He won't without your invitation.