December 5

The Christmas Spirit.
After writing yesterdays' story I came across some words from J.I. Packer in his book Knowing God, on the subject of the Christmas spirit.  This was helpful for me, so I share it with you:

"For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich."  2 Corinthians 8:9

"It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie.  "The Word became flesh" (Jn 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises. Needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this; the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation...
For the Son of God to empty himself and become poor meant a laying aside of glory; a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, isolation, ill-treatment, malice, and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony--spiritual, even more than physical--that his mind nearly broke under the prospect of it.  It meant love to the uttermost for unlovely men and women, who 'through his poverty, mighty become rich.'
This Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity--hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory--because at the Father's will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable so that thirty years later he might hang on a cross.  It is the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard, or will hear.
We talk glibly about the 'Christmas Spirit' rarely meaning more by this than sentimental jollity on a family basis.  But what we have said makes it clear that the phrase wshould in fact carry a tremendous weight of meaning.  It ought to mean the reproducing in human lives of the temper of him who for our sakes became poor at the first Christmas.  And the Christmas spirit itself out to be the mark of every Christian all the year round...
The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob.  For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor--spending and being spent--to enrich their fellow men and women, giving time, trouble, care, and concern, to do good to others--and not just their own friends--in whatever way there seems need.  There are not as many who show this spirit as there should be.  If God in mercy revives us, one of the things he will do will be to work more of this spirit in our hearts and lives."