Joy! to Your World! A Countdown to ChristmasMfano

“For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37) Christmas, for Mary, was learning the ultimate truth of this one statement. When Christmas comes around each year, we must embrace the absolute faith that nothing is impossible with God! Christmas is a reminder that we must always keep our focus on His Divinity and not on our frail humanity. Most of us go through the Christmas season focused on self ... on what we want and desire and deserve. Some people want a new house ... or a piece of great jewelry ... or for our children to come home for the holidays. Some folks emphatically believe that they deserve a Christmas bonus, a tree-laden with gifts or someone to clean the house for the holidays. If these are your desires, you are missing it! You have Christmas all wrong! You are missing the hard lesson that the life of Mary teaches all of us today: Our plans pale in comparison to His interruptions! The most significant desire that you will ever embrace is to ask God to interrupt your life with His love and His plans. What these verses don’t describe is the public outrage that Mary had yet to face. This girl who has just had her world rocked with a message from heaven, would now be spat upon and cursed as she walked by. Formerly she was known as “pure” and a “virgin”, and now her reputation was one of a loose and promiscuous woman. Perhaps now as Mary daily walked to the village well, she heard the coarse language of the men calling out nasty innuendos accompanied by raucous laughter. Mary learned, as we all must, that Christmas is not about me. Christmas is about dying to self, to preference and to normalcy. Christmas is the clarion call that none of us is able to live for human purposes ever again. We have all been embraced by the call of Christmas that resounds from Mary’s heart to our world today, “Live for His purposes! Live for Christ alone!” Christmas is about the intervention of God into our ordinary lives; it is about Christ being born into our disappointments and failures. Christmas is not about me - it is about Christ revealing Himself in me and to me! Now that’s something to celebrate!