A Christmas Story-Our Love For Each Other

The Christmas Story, Our Love For Each Other

Genesis 3:1-14 Luke 1:26-45 12/9/2018

Today we are in part 2 of “The Christmas Story. Last week Pastor Toby preached on God’s love for us. I will look at our love for each other. Many times when we think of love, we think of romance. Did you know that someone could pick out the right person for you in every way, and it can still turn into a disaster with you turning against the other person.

There was a song by the Bee Gees, “How a love so right, can turn out to be so wrong.” A lot of us are going to have some good intentions for Christmas, but despite our best efforts, some things are just going to go wrong. There will be some breakdown in relationship problems.

To truly understand Christmas, you need to understand how Christmas got started in the first place. It all began with two people who were loved by God, and who loved each other. They had the perfectly arranged marriage, because it was God who put the two of them together. Now if God put you together, and you still have problems, you can imagine what’s going to happen if you get to choose on your own.

The Christmas story began with God giving Adam and Eve, just one commandment to demonstrate their loyalty and trust in Him. God told them, they could eat of any tree in the garden, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because when they ate of it, they would die as a result. It’s not that Adam and Eve did not know that doing right was good and doing wrong was evil. They had that head knowledge. God didn’t want them to have the heart knowledge of the experience itself because it would corrupt their hearts.

It’s one thing to know that cocaine or fentanyl is bad for you. It’s another thing to know the actual experience of the use of it through your body. Satan’s lie to Adam and Eve was that by keeping them from the experience, the sensation of eating the fruit, God was limiting their freedom to enjoy the world. What they found was that, once they broke away from God through disobedience, it would not be long before they broke away from each other.

The moment they left God, the love they had for each other shifted, and they tried to hide certain parts of themselves from each other. We have been playing this hiding and shifting behind things ever since. We find its hard to be 100% honest or to tell the truth to each other completely and honestly.

When God challenged them on whether they had broken the one commandment he had given them, they did not want to take responsibility. Adam blamed Eve and God. “The woman you gave me, she gave me some and I ate. If everybody had of left me alone, I would be okay.” Eve blamed God and the serpent. The serpent deceived me and I ate. God if only you had of created me a little bit smarter, I would have seen through his lies.”

Isn’t it amazing that Jesus is interested in loving us at all, knowing how deceitful and prideful we can be. Why on earth would he be willing to die for us, when we won’t accept responsibility for our sins putting him on the cross in the first place.

Adam and Eve had been contaminated by sin, and once sin is a part of our lives, we are quick to blame and quick to change the way things really happened. Neither of them mentioned they spent some time looking at the fruit and thinking wow this looks good, they did not mention it was tempting to taste, and they did not mention the like the promise it would turn them into little gods.

The worst thing about it all is they had broken their love relationship to God and their love relationship to each other, and could not do a thing about it. This is where Christmas begins with a promise. God tells Satan, one day, one of Eve’s descendants would come into the world and crush the head of Satan. It’s interesting that God said, it would be Eve’s descendants, not Adam and Eve’s. God intended to send a Savior that would be born of a woman, but not with a man’s help. It would take a supernatural event to crush Satan because he is a spiritual being.

Adam and Eve were sent from the perfect garden of Eden that God had created for them. Hard work became a part of their lives. The love they had for each other was a struggle. Their first two children, Cain and Abel got into a fight and Cain killed his younger brother Abel over the issue of jealousy. God banished Cain into exile. Sin grew and grew upon the earth, until our love for each other was filled with all kinds of violence, anger, unforgiveness, cruelty and lack of kindness to each other.