A gift of intimacy ….

Dogs make awesome pets!

I’ve had different breeds of dogs as pets but Golden Retrievers and Black Labs are my favorite so far. They’re fun and intelligent animals, and a blast as puppies!

Which reminds me of a story about a guy whose dog had a litter of puppies. One day he sat and watched as the puppies fumbled and stumbled over each other, trying to get to their mother for milk. They still couldn’t see well, and they maneuvered quite clumsily. As the man watched the pups, he thought, “This is how God must see us … adorable but so needy. He must find it interesting to look down on us and watch how we fumble along.”

A lot of people probably picture God that way, but it’s really an inaccurate picture. God is not some distant deity watching us from afar as we “fumble along.” It’s the Christmas story that helps us understand a very different picture of God.

In Matthew 1:20-23 we read, “As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. ‘Joseph, son of David,’ the angel said, ‘do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord’s message through his prophet: ‘Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’”

At the heart of the Christmas story is God closing the gap between Him and us by becoming a man! The birth of Jesus Christ is the story of “Immanuel,” God Himself coming to be with us in the flesh.

Actually, the Bible helps us understand that God is spirit, and that He is everywhere. We see over and over in the Old Testament God reassuring His people that He is, and will be, with them in their endeavors. We see a picture of this in Psalm 139:7-12: “I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night — but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you.”

But Christmas is about a gift of greater intimacy with God … of God being with us so that He could, through the gift of His Son, be in us.

Although Jesus no longer walks the earth in physical form, we have something even better: God living in us through the form of the Holy Spirit! “Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16).

The babe born on that first Christmas was the start of God’s gift to humankind. We haven’t fully received that gift until Christ has come to live in us through the Holy Spirit.

Have you received the gift of Jesus Christ? Do you know the intimacy of the Holy Spirit of God dwelling in you? If not, that can be your greatest gift this Christmas, to receive the Son of God as the Savior He was sent to be.

And if you do, all the more reason to celebrate!

Merry Christmas!

Scotty