The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas (15 page)

Look for someone today who is doing some little, good thing that is likely to go unnoticed. Slip that person a happy note to say he or she is making a difference!

It was not suddenly and unannounced that Jesus came into the world. He came into a world that had been prepared for Him. The whole Old Testament is the story of a special preparation. . . . Only when all was ready, only in the fullness of His time, did Jesus come.

PHILLIPS BROOKS

When have you felt like Bethlehem . . . poor, small, forgotten?

What worries do you need to surrender to God, knowing He is firmly on His throne?

Take a moment to thank God for the eucatastrophe of Christmas —for conquering evil with righteousness.

I will go in to see the king.

ESTHER 4:16

Esther told Hathach to go back and relay this message to Mordecai: “All the king’s officials and even the people in the provinces know that anyone who appears before the king in his inner court without being invited is doomed to die unless the king holds out his gold scepter. And the king has not called for me to come to him for thirty days.” So Hathach gave Esther’s message to Mordecai.

Mordecai sent this reply to Esther: “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?”

Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai: “Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I must die.” So Mordecai went away and did everything as Esther had ordered him.

ESTHER 4:10-17

Sometimes you see them huddling under the bridge on the west side. Two or three of them, their hats pulled wind thin over their ears. They look like hungry prayers, their bare hands held out over flame licking off the sides of an old oil barrel.

So much for chestnuts roasting on the open fire.

This is about the open fire warming the tips of your numbed fingers, distracting you from the cold icing down the nape of your neck.

How does Advent come and kindle in the guy living out of a cardboard box behind the busy mall in mid-December? In the woman slapped around in the flat over the bar serving up office Christmas parties? In the pregnant runaway down at the bus station who’s watching everybody head home and doesn’t know where the next meal will come from, the next kind word, the next clean bed?

Mordecai —he was in sackcloth outside the palace gate.

He sent word to his niece, chosen queen of the king, to never forget the plight of those collected on the other side of the gate: “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die.”

It comes like a whisper from those outside the gate:
You’ve got to use the life you’ve been given to give others life.

You’ve got gifts that weren’t given to line your life with; they were given to be a lifeline to others —or you lose your life.

It comes like an echo from God: if your gifts don’t give relief, you don’t get real life.

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?

It comes as a message for Advent, the Mordecai message for such a time as now: you’ve got to use your position inside the gate for those outside the gate —or you’re in the position of losing everything.

If you have any food in your fridge, any clothes in your closet, any small roof, rented or owned, over your head, you are richer than 75 percent of the world. We are the ones living inside the gate.

If you have anything saved in the bank, any bills in your wallet, any spare change in a jar, you are one of the top 8 percent wealthiest people in the world. We are the ones living inside the gate.

If you can read these words right now, you have a gift three billion people right now don’t. If your stomach isn’t twisted in hunger pangs, you have a gift that one billion
people right now don’t. If you know Christ as the greatest Gift, you have a gift that untold millions of people right now don’t.
We are the ones living inside the gate.

Esther hears the Mordecai message, and it does something to her soul.
You’ve got to use your position inside the gate for those outside the gate —or you’re in the position of losing everything.

Esther puts herself in the place of those outside the gate and makes herself the bridge to the King. And the woman given gifts for such a time as this —she risks her position for the people.
If I perish, I perish.

There’s a boy right now splayed in the slum and sewage of Calcutta. A child crying weak for food in Uganda, this haunting plea like the cry of the last raven. And there’s One whose home was the original palace, One who is the apex of beauty, One who put Himself in the place of you outside the gate, you in the muck and the mire and the stench of sin. There is One who came to a barn and made Himself a bridge back to the King by laying down His back on the bark of that Tree. He looked at you desperate on the outside of the gate, and His love was instant. He didn’t ponder,
If I perish, I perish.
He promised, “So I perish, I perish.”

This is the love story that has been coming for you since the beginning. That Babe in the manger —He is the Prince
on the Cross who saves you with His life, so your identity is no longer wrapped up in being one of the rich ones inside the gate. Your identity is wrapped up in being one of the rich ones
inside of Him
.

When you unwrap your worth in the Gift of Christ, you release your grip on all the other gifts. You are loved and carried and secure, and what else do you need when you have Him? You are free,
free
, to lavishly give away your gifts when all your value, worth, joy, and riches are in the greatest of gifts.

Why, writes George Müller, would anyone inside the gate “seek to be rich, and great, and honored in that world where his Lord was poor, and mean, and despised”?
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You can see it during Advent —over on the west side, over in the slum, over the backyard fence —the way someone reaches out a hand and someone weak grabs hold. And all the gates give way to God.

For such a time as this.

God made you for such a time as this. Find one person you can help today in a time of need.

Enemy-occupied territory —that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed . . . and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

C. S. LEWIS