Have you heard the short story by O’Henry, "The Gift of the Magi?" The story is about a young married couple who are very much in love.  And also very poor.  Christmas is approaching and neither one has enough money to buy the other a Christmas gift.  Each one does have one prized possession that they hold dear to themselves. Something they treasure very much.  Della, the wife, has beautiful waist-length long hair.  Jim, the husband, has a beautiful gold pocket watch that belonged to his grandfather.

In her selfless love for her husband, Della goes to a wig maker and sells her hair in order to buy for Jim a beautiful extravagant gold chain for his watch.  But Jim, in the mean time, sells his watch in order to buy Della a beautiful set of combs and hair brushes for her hair.  Each one, out of love for the other, sacrifices the one thing they prize most for the other. That’s real giving.

And Christmas is a time of giving.  It is a time of giving that has gotten to be so far beyond anything most of us can imagine, that as we discover what an incredible time of giving it is, it begs an answer to this question:  “How did this all start?  How did it get to such a place?”

The giving of gifts and spending of money during this season, in its own way, is a subtle testimony to the power of God.  Christmas is a season when giving is catapulted into a national festival of such proportions that major companies rise and fall on the Christmas giving habits of the population.  Did you know that in the States, the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday?  Because on this day, merchants hope to move their ledgers from red to black.  Annually, one quarter of all retail sales are made during the Christmas shopping season!

Let’s put that into perspective.  In North America, for the holiday of Halloween, we spend $3 billion.  For Father’s Day we spend $8 billion.  For Mother’s Day, we spend $11.5 billion.  For Valentine’s Day, we spend $13 billion.  For Christmas… we spend $240 billion.  And that is going up!  On average, shoppers overspend their Christmas budgets by $400 apiece!  Can anyone relate?  And Gallup says that we each spend an average of $763 on Christmas gifts!

Here’s why these statistics are so amazing to me.  We live in a very selfish generation, do we not?  Many sociologists describe our generation as the “me-first” generation.  And yet, for a period of time at the end of the year, we spend 240 billion dollars buying things for other people!  (Now I know some of you buy your own Christmas presents, but I am not counting you! J )  But look what we do during this season – we make our shopping lists, and we go out in heavy traffic, and spend an enormous amount of money to give gifts to somebody else!

There isn’t anything like that in any other part of our culture.  Isn’t it interesting that this is the thing that the secularists are now trying to take away?!  They are doing everything they can to do away with the one dynamic that caused this to happen in the first place!  This is the celebration of CHRISTmas!  This is not a “holiday.”  This is CHRISTmas!!  This is the Birthday of the Lord Jesus!  And the reason we have been taught to give to one another is because God set the example by giving us the greatest gift that’s ever been given!  The gift of God is the real centerpiece of the season!  All of the other giving is merely a reflection of what God has done!

The Bible tells us Christmas is wrapped around a GIFT.  We didn’t make this up.  You know these verses:  Ephesians 2:8.  “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the ____”  What, class?  It is the gift of God.   Romans 6:23.  “The wages of sin is death, but the _____ “  What?  The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  2 Corinthians 9:15.  “Thanks be to God for his indescribable ____.”  What?  Gift!  God has given us a gift!  You can’t miss it! That gift includes eternal life, forgiveness, love, peace, joy, hope!  Paul says it’s an indescribable gift!  It goes beyond anything you can describe!

But the question is: “What is this gift?”  What is the gift that God has given us?  What is this indescribable gift that started all the giving, which now has exploded into the giving frenzy of Christmas shopping?  Maybe John 3:16 can help.  “For God so loved the world that He…”  What did He do?  He gave!  And what’s the rest of it?  He gave his only Son.  Isaiah tells us: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.”  So the gift of Christmas is the gift of Jesus Christ to this world, which happened on a starry night in Bethlehem. The gift of God came in a little baby.  Born to a Jewish maiden.  The gift of God is his Son Jesus.  And when you understand who Jesus is, you come to the conclusion that God not only gave us his Son.  God gave us Himself.  Jesus is God in the flesh.  He is not just the Son of God.  He is God the Son.

There are so many people that try arguing that the Bible doesn’t tell us that Jesus is God.  A lot of folks are willing to accept the fact that Jesus was a good man, a great teacher.  But when you say to them that Jesus is God, that He is divine, then they push back and say, “No, the Bible doesn’t teach that.”  The Bible does indeed teach that!  In fact, when someone tells you that the Bible doesn’t say Jesus is divine, you know they haven’t read their Bible!  Because over and over in the NT, the Holy Spirit went out of his way to make sure we understand that truth.  John 1:1 &18.  John 14:9.  Col.1:19.  Hebrews 1:1-3.

God spoke to us!  He gave us a revelation of Himself!  That’s why Jesus is referred to as the Word.  He is God’s message, God’s revelation to us of Himself.  We could know something about God without Jesus, but we could never know God as we know Him because of Jesus Christ.  Jesus is God coming down from heaven to be born in a manger and to become one of us.  A human being like you and me.  To have the Godhead poured into the confines of human flesh is a mystery that none of us can comprehend, and yet it is what Christmas is all about.

The gift of God is God Himself.  Christ coming to bring God down to where we are.  Isaiah calls Him Immanuel – God with us.  If we don’t understand that gift, if we won’t accept it, then we miss out on what Christmas is!  We reflect Christmas with our own giving, but until we understand that giving is a reflection of the greatest gift ever given, we’re missing the beauty of God giving his Son to us!  Let’s appreciate his gift!

During WWII, stars were hung in the windows of homes where young men had gone off to serve.  One blue star for each son who left.  A gold one if he wasn’t coming home.  One evening, a young boy was walking down the street with his father.  The stars in the windows caught his eye, and he began counting them.  “One star in that window,” he announced.  “And one in the next.”  He clapped his hands and shouted, “Oh, look, Daddy!  There are three stars at that house!”  His dad was getting the feeling that the boy was too young to understand the meaning behind all this.  How does one explain to a 5-year-old the loneliness, hopes, and fears on the other side of those stars in the windows?  Then they came to a vacant lot.  There were no houses and no windows in which to hang service stars.  But hanging in the distant night sky was one evening star brightly glowing.  “Oh, look… look!” the little boy exclaimed.  “There’s one star in God’s window!  That means God gave a Son, too!”  And then, noticing the gold colour of the star, he added, “Oh!  That means his Son died.”  And friends, as sure as that star still shines, God’s Son, the greatest gift of all time, lives on forever.  Thank God for his indescribable gift!

When we celebrate Christmas by giving to one another, we are reflecting God’s gift to us.  That giving thing started in the heart of God and is resounding even in the commercialism of our day, which we often criticize.  But, in its own subliminal way, it is giving testimony to the greatness of God, who began this giving thing in the first place!  So as we see the merchants trying to sell their stuff, and as we do all our buying and wrapping, it is simply an echo that has been resounding through the generations.  An echo of giving that started in the heart of God.

But a gift is not really a gift until it is received.  There was a Christmas celebration once, a family with two young boys at their grandparents’ house.  Well, that year, the grandparents learned that you don’t give a pair of socks to a little boy.  Now, they gave him a lot of other things, but they thought it would be cool to wrap up these little socks as well, but the boy opened them up and threw them across the room!  He just discarded them!  “Now let’s get on to the real thing.”  They gave the gift.  But he didn’t accept it.

Once I noticed Dawn was doing some major cleaning, and she had a pile of boxes out in our hallway.  I asked her what was in the boxes, and she told me she was taking a bunch of our old clothes to give them away.  And I remember thinking, how nice of her.  Then, just out of curiosity, I opened one of the boxes.  And there was the sweater I had given her the Christmas before!  And that wasn’t it!  Underneath that were at least 3 other “gifts” I had given her!

You can give gifts.  But they aren’t always received, are they?   And sometimes they get thrown out.  God has given us a gift – his Son Jesus.  The gift has been given to us.  But God doesn’t force Himself on us!  He doesn’t push Jesus in our face.  He offers Himself to us as you would offer a gift to a friend.  He pleads with us to accept that gift.  To believe in Him.  To receive that gift through faith.

A man came to see his pastor one day because his family was in terrible trouble.  He and his wife had been going through all kinds of marital discord to the point where they had given up and were now in the divorce courts.  They had a little boy, and this man’s heart was broken because he was losing regular contact with that little child.  He would only be able to see him at certain times.  He tried so hard, but he had made so many mistakes in the past, and the little boy was taking his mother’s side and was turning against his father.  And it broke the father’s heart.

One day, after all the proceedings were over, the man went to where his wife and son were staying, to try to begin to restore the relationship with his boy.  And here came the most painful moment of his life.  When he went to embrace his son, his son pushed him away.  He stuck his hands out and shoved him away.  He wouldn’t let his father embrace him.  The man said to his pastor, “I’ve known a lot of pain in my life, and this marriage has been painful, but nothing ever hurt as much as having your own son reject you and not allow you into his life.

I wonder what the emotion is in the heart of God the Father, who emptied heaven of its greatest treasure, and sent Him down here as his gift of love, offering Him to all of us freely, when He sees us turning it away?  Leaving the gift on the table.  Saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.”  I believe that because He is our Father, that his Father-heart is broken! 

Please, let me urge you tonight not to break the Father’s heart!  The Father has offered you the greatest gift that will ever be offered.  A gift that keeps on giving in this life, and throughout eternity.  A gift offered freely to you.  It is gratis.  A free gift!  Trust God on this!  Let the Holy Spirit work faith in your heart!  Believe in this gift God has given you!  Please don’t do this to God:  Don’t say “thanks, but no thanks.”  Don’t leave the gift of God in the manger.  Pick it up and take it with you!  Begin your Christmas celebration by appreciating the greatest GIFT you ever have received!  Thank God for his indescribable gift!   Amen.