You’re Worth Loving
This year St. Peter’s UCC in Grant Park is providing the book A Love Worth Giving to You at Christmas by Max Lucado for our members to distribute to their families, friends, and neighbors as a small gift. Each book includes an invitation to worship with our church family on Christmas Eve.
Throughout Advent we are reminding everyone that they are worth loving! Lucado writes, “(Jesus) went from commanding angels to sleeping in straw. From holding stars to clutching Mary’s finger. The palm that held the universe took the nail of a soldier. Why? Because that’s what love does.”
Each day, during Advent, join us for a journey to see just how much God’s love for you is evidenced in the story of Christmas.
Love Defined
With the focus of this Advent devotional series on A Love Worth Giving to You at Christmas, it is important for us to take some time to reflect on what love is.
Love can be so many things. It can be an action, an emotion, and so much more.
In the Christmas Story there are so many examples of love, seen and unseen.
However, in the actual birth of Christ we see the action of love as part of our gift for us.
I John 4:10 reads, “This is LOVE: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
I like what the author of The Greatest Gift, Ann Voskamp, had to say:
“Our God who breathes stars in the dark – He breathes Bethlehem’s Star, then takes on lungs and breathes in stable air. We are saved from hopelessness because God came with infant fists and opened wide His hand to take the iron-sharp edge of our sins.
Our God who forms and delivers the black of the heavens – He waits patiently like an embryo in a womb and delivers Himself to free you. We are saved from forever pain, because God pierced the dark and came to the pinpoint of us in the universe and took the nails.
Our God who cradles whole galaxies in the palm of His hand, whom highest heavens cannot contain – He folds Himself into our skin, and He uncurls His newborn fingers in the cradle of a barn feeding trough.”
Ann Voskamp
Therefore, we are saved from our sin and the punishment we deserve.
This is the greatest expression of love that ever existed – and all because YOU are worth loving.
How incredible is the love of God. How great it is to know that the God of the universe came to this world as a child, to become the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Prayer: You gave us breathe, Holy Creator. You have created us uniquely, with a deep love that we will never understand. Your love was expressed in the victory over death and darkness so that we may have life and live in light. Amen.
Devotional
Devotional