God's Greatest Gift
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Do you remember all the Christmas gifts you received this year? It shouldn’t be too hard. It was only a couple of weeks ago. Each time you enjoy any of those gifts you remember the gift giver. Their thoughtfulness, their kindness, and their affection. Good gifts that get enjoyed again and again are a great thing.
But how many Christmases can you go back and still remember the gifts you received? Do you think you could remember two-thirds of your gifts from last year? Or half of the presents you received from two Christmases ago?
It’s can be hard to remember past gifts, unless they’re right in front of you. It’s stunning how quickly good gifts that we once appreciated can totally slip our minds when they aren’t still being enjoyed regularly.
But it’s also amazing that you can rediscover an old Christmas gift and all those memories come flooding back to you. In those moments, it’s kind of like you are opening the gift all over again.
It may be hard to remember all your gifts from a couple of years ago. But can you remember any Christmas present from more than a decade ago?
For a gift to be remembered that many years later, it’s probably something pretty thoughtful, timeless, and wonderful and from someone pretty special. Someone who has brought you a lot of joy. Someone who has been there for you through thick and thin. Someone who has given you other good gifts too, I’m sure, but most importantly they’ve given you the best of themselves. They’ve cared about you and their gift is a reflection of that love. That’s part of the reason you still have that gift and remember receiving it.
One of Jesus’ close friends, John, knew exactly what it was like to receive a gift like that. This gift wasn’t just memorable. It was more than just life-changing. It was life-giving. John 3:16 God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. In these words, John reveals God’s motive, his intended recipients, and how he hopes his gift will be enjoyed. It is a thoughtful, timeless, and wonderful gift of God to each one of us.
God was moved by his love for the whole wold to give his Son. That alone is a jaw-dropping statement. We might have a great number of friends in this world, but we would struggle to say we love all of them.
More than that, we are not naturally drawn to love everyone in the whole world. Not complete strangers. Not the lady who was rude to you at the store. Not the guy who cut you off in traffic. Not the gossipy nuisance of a neighbor down the street. We struggle to love people who treat us poorly or take advantage of us. In short, we struggle to love people who sin against us.
But not God. Every sin that has ever been committed in the history of this world has been against God. Yet, he loved a world full of sinners that has consistently ignored his wisdom, disobeyed his directions, and loved the things he created for them more than they loved the one who created those things. God loved rebellious people like us, enough to give us his very best—his Son.
You’d think there would be some catch. But this gift just keeps getting better and better. God doesn’t demand you that earn his Son’s stamp of approval by giving him good gifts or even groveling at his feet. He doesn’t require you to be righteous enough to snag a spot in Jesus’ inner circle. His gift is free—unconditional and unearned by us. His gift of his Son is for everyone and he really wants everyone—yes you!—to benefit from this thoughtful, timeless, wonderful gift.
So what do you have to do? John says simply believe in him and you will have eternal life. And even this believing is a gift of God.
Think about how your belief in someone develops and matures. It happens when you spend time with that person—good times and bad times. You trust a person more and more, the more you get to know them and they demonstrate their reliability, their truthfulness, and their faithfulness.
That’s why God has given you his Word—a reliable testimony about who this Son is and what he has done for you. Open the Gospel of Mark, for instance, and you will see Jesus hard at work in living, dying and rising from the grave as our Redeemer. He did that for you. If you could earn your own salvation, Jesus went through a lot of trouble for nothing.
But Jesus did all this for you, because he loves you. He has given you his perfect righteous record, his substitutionary death, and his glorious resurrection as the most thoughtful, timeless, and wonderful gift ever. Jesus is truly God’s greatest gift. A gift worth remembering. A gift you can enjoy every single day and for eternity.