Will You Find Jesus This Christmas?
Good Morning Friends,
Christmas Eve holds many memories for me: Being with family admiring Christmas decorations… putting out hundreds of luminaries… attending candlelight services and helping to make great music…doing dramatic readings…attending midnight masses and hearing the reading of Luke 2. But I also have had the experience of praying for the dying, of giving out gift bags to those in the flop houses in Immokalee…to the women who live in and work the bars of Immokalee at Christmas time…They would always ask us to sing, Amazing Grace and here we would discover Jesus. Will You Find Jesus This Christmas?
Scripture: In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
Mark 1:35-39 (NRSV)
Message: A challenge lies before us as a body of believers. Meeting people’s needs with love is meant to be combined with sharing…proclaiming the good news. I think this is especially true at Christmas. We are not to separate God from community. We cannot if we love. We are not to segregate church from human need. We cannot if we love. This is not an either or proposition. We need to be freed… we need to be sent by our worshiping communities to the larger body beyond the walls. Here each and every one of us are to minister to the spiritual and physical needs of others. Poverty cannot be effectively addressed only in the pews. The diversity and the plurality of our gifts need to be taken to the streets…to our families to our community. Then we will discover that Jesus in not just in the manger scene. Jesus is everywhere…everywhere we come in the spirit of Christ’s love, He is already there waiting. And so, we must get into our nature a way of living out redemption not just proclaiming it. It is in the doing that we gain the experience of God. It is in the doing that we learn how to love.
Pray that God shows us the needs of those in our own community…Pray that God shows us how we can begin to meet those needs. Pray that we not just proclaim the redemptive word but also find ways of living out a redemptive nature. Pray that we be a Merry Christmas.
Blessings,
John Lawson
Daily Devotionals 