It’s been a tough morning, and I am aware of the gifts I don’t deserve in my life. As the holy day of Christmas approaches I have to confess I don’t deserve my beautiful, wonderful wife; especially in view of my complete failure to live up to the standard of the scriptures during my previous 23 year marriage, riddled with compromise and hypocrisy. I don’t deserve such a gift as this whom I have failed so many times already, and I certainly didn’t deserve for her to put her life on the line in an effort to give me a child which ended for us in such pain and sorrow when our first child passed during the early stages of her pregnancy, and how much less did I deserve that she would go through it all again, with great difficulty to give birth to our precious daughter a little more than a year later.I couldn’t possibly deserve any of these gifts, nor even the gift of a job such as I have had for two decades now, indeed Christmas makes me very aware of the truth that I deserve nothing but the flames of an eternal hell!
Hell you say? Of course, what else could a man deserve who rejects not once, but countless times the greatest gift ever given to humanity? Every time I have failed to receive this gift of salvation and eternal life that is only found in Jesus Christ, it has been a slap in the face of the incomprehensible love of God the Father. Every act of disobedience, every failure to do what He commands, every attempt to save myself through my own power or goodness, these are the things that say I am deserving, and not I alone, but all people, including you, of eternal hell, for they all reject this greatest gift of His love! It’s not that anyone deserves hell because they told a lie, or committed some other sin, but it is the rejection of the grace that is offered to forgive that sin and to reconcile us to God. We say in essence “We have no need of you God, nor your grace,” when we turn away from the gift of Eternal Light that entered into the darkness of the human race 2,000 years ago.
So consider what gifts you think you deserve this Christmas and contemplate what ones you don’t and may Jesus Christ truly get what He deserves from us at the end of the day! God Almighty has truly loved us, in such an incredibly intense fashion that He has not withheld His own Son from the horror of the death we inflicted upon Him, and the last thing He wants is for anyone to choose hell, rather than eternal life, but He has left it up to us, to open the gift, or not.