Love: The Reason For Christmas

Love: The Reason For Christmas

Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, 13; Matthew 1:18-21; Mark 10:42-45

For the next four weeks we are going to talk about love, hope and faith. Specifically we will talk about:

• Love: The Reason For Christmas

• Love: The Reason It’s Most Important

• Hope: The Reason We Believe

• Faith: The Reason We Hope

In this short series we will close out the year with love and open the New Year with hope and faith. I wrote part one on Hope for last Sunday but we were unable to have service due to the weather. However, I believe the flow is actually going to work better with our ending the year talking about the importance of love. We will open the year with hope and why we need it in order to believe what the Bible says, and why faith is the reason we have hope. These three, love, hope and faith are at the core of every Christian’s life. So let’s get started with love being the reason for Christmas and next week we will talk about why love is most important.

In the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, Paul told the Church in Corinth: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3, 13) From these verses we see that Christians should possess faith, hope and love but the most important thing is love. Now, the love this passage is talking about can only be found in the person who is born again, the person who has accepted Jesus as His Lord and Savior. How do you know this Pastor? Dionne Warwick had it right when she sung “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” She didn’t know, or perhaps she did, that the love she was singing about was the kind of love that we can only receive from Jesus. It is the one thing that is most needed in this world and yet it is primarily this time of year when people feel most like sharing it. This time of year exists because of love. We are sitting here today because of love. I want you to think about that this morning as I share with you part one of this series “Love: The Reason For Christmas.”

This morning, as I have done so many times in the past, I’m going to begin by putting myself on “Front Street.” For those of you who are not familiar with the phrase, “Front Street” simply means I’m going to share something with you that’s personal and not particularly flattering about me. And I’m only willing to do this because you love me! As you know, I was born on December 13th so the month of December had a double meaning for me. On December 1st there would be 12 days until my birthday. On my birthday, then there would be 12 more days until Christmas. The 12 days between my birthday and Christmas were the longest twelve days of my life as a child. During those 12 days it seemed like time stood still. It was like I was in an old movie where people knew something was getting ready to happen and everyone was just watching the clock waiting for it. Tick, tock, tick tock as the seconds passed with nothing happening. Before I understood or could read a calendar, like all kids I would daily ask my mom how many more days until Christmas. I spent many hours, some alone and some with my siblings, just sitting in the living room watching the artificial aluminum Christmas tree change colors as the color wheel turned and shined on it. I loved looking at that tree as it was one of the things that made Christmas so special for me.

The week before Christmas we would have our annual Christmas program at Church. That program was all about the Christmas story. We would sing Christmas songs as a choir and then the deacons would “estimate” the value of the Christmas tree. You see, in the Church I grew up in, there was a big Christmas tree near the pulpit and underneath it there would be gifts for the kids. The deacons would stand up and make a big show of looking at all the gifts and then one would say with a loud voice what they collectively thought the value of the tree was. This was part of the program that I never understood but later I learned that “individual” Christmases was measured by how much a family could afford to spend that particular year. So people would say this is a “big” Christmas for us or this will be a “small” Christmas and it was based on what they could afford to spend. After that the gifts would be handed out and then everyone was given bags with apples, oranges, candy and nuts in them. The Church’s Christmas program held me over until Christmas day.