‘Jesus, our Christmas gift’ by Liz Nixon, 15 December 2024
What makes a great gift? Liz Nixon looks at the value of thoughtful, meaningful gifts and how they can build relationships when we grow love in return. The talk concludes with ten minutes of ‘examen’ prayer, which can also be practised with the Pray As You Go app at https://pray-as-you-go.org
Transcript
It’s Christmas so I’m talking about Jesus and gifts!
Have you done your Christmas shopping yet? How is the present shopping going? What else do you still need to buy? 10 days until Christmas and we are fully into the season of Advent, where we take a number of weeks to prepare our hearts to receive the gift of Jesus.
Unsurprisingly, I've been thinking a lot about gifts over the last few weeks in preparation for today, and I came across this gem, a total gift from Elon Musk! Here's how not to do gifts.
"Amber Heard (his ex girlfriend) loved spending money carelessly when she was dating me as long as it was my money. But one thing she didn't know is that I'm a businessman and even my emotions don't mingle with my business. I documented everything I spent on her. I mean every single dime. I presented her with the receipt of every penny I ever gave her during our relationship and she paid everything in full because I had her sign a document that she would pay back my money if we didn't end up together. I'm very stingy with ladies and I guess that's why I'm still single." ~ Elon Musk
Wow, no wonder they broke up if that was his approach to gifts and relationship!
Gifts can be tricky.
Have you ever received a gift and wondered " Umm, what were you thinking?!". A long time ago, I received a necklace, a necklace with lots of black flowers, very ornate and embellished and fussy. It was not my style at all. Nice, but not at all me or the kind of thing I like or would wear. Bless the family member who bought it, they obviously thought I would like it. But it did leave me feeling "do they know me at all?!".
I noticed this last week that Etsy’s Christmas strapline for buying gifts from them says – get them a gift that says “I get you”. And that’s it isn’t it? We all want to be known, for others to get who we are and what we like.
And so to the other extreme of the necklace - it was my 40th birthday two years ago. And the gifts I got were perfect for me; I received a bottle of my favourite perfume; I received a cake tin, with my name on it and in my favourite colour ; I received an amazon voucher, and proceeded to buy the books that had been on my wishlist for a while. And I got a huge tub of picknmix - all fizzy sweets, my absolute favourites.
Those gifts were spot on for me and my loves and my passions. My friends got me and I felt known, seen and loved. That's the power of a good gift.
Christmas is the season for gift giving, and today, I'm going to be focussing on the gift of Jesus, what makes Him a good gift and God’s hope from giving us the gift of Jesus. We'll end with a time of meditation, to savour the gift of Jesus and other gifts given to us. And then we'll then have a chance to respond to God's generosity with some sung worship. Let me just pray.
Ok. So we are going to be looking at the theme of gifts in two parts; firstly, the gift of Jesus to us. And secondly, God’s hope.
Christmas is naturally the time when we think of the gift of Jesus to us. And in one of the most famous Bible verses of all, we get great insight into the gift of Jesus at Christmas. A purposefull gift, given with relational motivation. This is a verse all about giving and love and relationship and restoration of relationship.
John 3 v16 says “for God so loved the world that He gave His only son so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.
It's a very well known verse and we are going to start at the end of the verse:
So that we will not perish but have eternal life
This part of the verse shows us the purpose of the gift: the purpose of Jesus as a gift is to save us, to prevent us from perishing. In the same way, when you give someone a bar of chocolate, the intent is to eat it, jewellery is to be worn, books are to be read. When we are given Jesus, his purpose is to save us. We talk about this a lot at Christmas: we read numerous prophecies surrounding the coming Saviour, one who will save His people. His name means "God saves" and an angel tells Joseph he should name the baby Jesus, as the baby will “save the people from their sins”.
The function of Jesus as a gift to us is to save us from our sins. We ruin relationship with God and others through our thoughts, words and deeds. Yet God does not want us to perish. He wants to save us, and He does it through a gift, the gift of Jesus.
But there's a bonus with Jesus - we aren't just saved, pulled out of the water onto dry land when we’re drowning as it were, but we are saved for something: eternal life in all its fullness and abundance. It's a restoration of what was meant to be back in the Garden of Eden, before Adam & Eve sinned. His purpose is to save us and bring intimacy to our relationship with The Trinity once more. Eternal intimacy with an eternal God.
He gave His only Son
God gives the gift of His son, His only Son, which makes Him a very costly gift to give. It’s a sacrifice to give something up if it is the only one you have, which makes Jesus a very precious gift to give.
It's also a highly personal and relational gift. Think about it for a moment: God need not have given us a person - there could have been a mechanism or simply a button that we press and ping, we've been saved. Ping, And now we enter eternal life.
But He didn’t do that. Instead, God chose to give us the person of Jesus, with the potential for a relationship with that Person, whose purpose is also to save us for relationship and intimacy. It's so highly relational in its intent. The gift of relationship with Jesus, by the Trinity, enables relationship with all three members of the Trinity once again.
And finally to the beginning of the verse. And ultimately to why God does anything and everything.
For God so loved the world
The reason for the gift of Jesus is love. We gift something to someone out of love. And God does exactly the same. But God doesn't just love the world, he SO loves the world. You could also translate it as something like "With such great love for the world, God gave . . . Or God really, really, really truly, madly deeply loved the world.”
It’s with the greatest possible level of love that God loves the world. And He gifts us a gift, the person of Jesus. In receiving and accepting Him, we are gifted further tokens of His love by entering into eternal life and the gift of relationship with this God forever. That's a whole lot of love and that's a whole lot of gifts! And it's meant to be! We are in relationship with the most loving persons in the world, and They express Their love to us through generous and abundant giving of gifts within gifts, and gifts within the gifted person of Jesus.
So, Jesus is a great gift, a gift that we desperately need and that changes our lives for the better.
Part Two: God’s hope.
But whilst a gift is given freely, deep down, the giver is hoping for something in return. And it looks a little something like this:
This is a picture of my kids last Christmas when they received a Nintendo Switch. We’d been playing the “its really very expensive” game to disguise the fact that they were going to get one. And they were so surprised when they opened it, and they were so full of joy and happiness! That’s what we hope for when we give a gift – that they experience joy and happiness, and that they know that we love them very much.
We give gifts to deepen relationship and connection. That’s what I experienced when I received my birthday presents. I appreciated the gifts and I appreciated my friends seeing me, knowing me and loving me. And a deeper sense of connection and relationship grew as a result.
Gifts are given freely and willingly, and without payment in return, but are given in hope of a positive, relational response. We want to see smiles and joy and laughter. We want them to know that we love them and care for them. And we also want their love and affection in return don’t we? That's the hope behind a gift – love in return.
Over the last ten weeks, I've been going through a retreat in daily life, based on the spiritual exercises by the Jesuit priest Ignatius of Loyola. There's a book to accompany you through each week and one of the lines really struck me, and has stayed with me:
All things in this world are created because of God's love and they become a context of gifts, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.
God creates everything in love and because of love, gifts things, people, places, to us. Those gifts become a way for us to know God better and for us to love Him in return - He gifts us gifts in hope of a positive relational response. He wants those gifts to deepen our love and affection for Him. God gifts us gifts so that we might love Him back. He wants our love and gifts make a return of love easier for us.
When I read that, I couldn’t quite believe it. I’m used to hearing about how much God loves me, and there’s a reason why john 3 v16 is one of the most famous in the Bible – it talks about God’s love. And most of the famous verses in the Bible are all about God, being a God of love and we sing songs about God loving us with an overwhelming, never-ending, reckless kind of love. His love never fails, never gives up, never runs out on me. It’s so often about God’s great love, which is obviously a good and right thing.
But I was so struck by the thought that God wants me to return love to Him. Me! Little old me! God wants my love! And He tries to make it easy for me to love Him back. God is not playing hard to get – He is upfront about the fact that He wants my love.
God wants your love, your affection, your passion, your heart. All the gifts He gives you are so that you might love Him back. Have you ever stopped to consider that?
God, Father Son and Holy Spirit – they gave us the gift of Jesus at Christmas, both for the purpose of saving us for eternal relationship with them but also that we might appreciate the gift and love them back. And if Jesus were the only gift we ever received, that would be enough. That alone would be worthy of a return of love.
But they gift us so much more! They give us friends, families, homes, jobs, communities, mountains and beaches, fun, fizzy sweets, holidays, sunshine, laughter, chocolate, parties, red wine, sunsets, ducks on ponds, and a whole range of other things, too many things to list.
They give us all these gifts, all the things in the world are created, in the hope that it makes it easier for us to return love to them. They are trying to make it easy for us. It’s done in love, hoping for love in return. That’s God’s hope.
Back to the phrase from my book:
All things in this world are created because of God's love and they become a context of gifts, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.
He is the God of relationship and love , and it’s a two way street.
The God of the universe wants you to love Him back. He wants your love and your affection, your smiles, your I love yous, your quick prayers in the middle of a busy day, a quick burst into song, a quick prayer of thanks. It's that simple, but means so much to Him.
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, full of love and joy between them, created the world and placed humans in it. Humans to love and to invite into relationship with them.
Our response has been to cause destruction and death in a world meant for fullness of life, love and relationship. And God's response to our response is to send us the Christmas gift of Jesus. God’s response to our sin is to give us Jesus, and a whole host of other gifts that make up our day to day living. He gives those gifts so that you might know Him and love Him back. He wants your love in return.
what can I give Him? We can give Him our heart, right now and in increasing measures over this Advent season and into the year ahead.
So, to what extent are you aware of the gifts of God to you? Have you considered that those gifts are a token of love, to make it easy for you to love Him back?
In the style of John Mark Comer, is there a practice that can help us to notice God's gifts? Where we can train ourselves to pay attention to the gifts given to us?
A practice where we can savour the goodness of God and His gifts? Where our hearts become softened by His love and generosity, so we then return love back to Him? A way that this noticing can work out in our lives in a real way, becoming practice and habit rather than theory?
A daily practice of examining our lives for the gift of God and the ways that he has shown up in our lives is a simple thing to do, and a good place to start. Ignatias of Loyola would say if you can only pray one prayer each day, then pray the examen. My book states that God is in the detail, not the devil! God is in the detail of our lives, if only we would take notice of Him.
I’ve been listening to a podcast on praying with Ignatius and the speaker, Gemma Simmonds says”this type of prayer is about becoming more aware of God’s presence in my life, not just in the great mountaintop revelation moments, but in the little bits and pieces of ordinary life.
So we are going to do that together. We’ve got some prayer cards on the Examen to hand out, so make sure you grab one of those, feel free to write notes on it and use it in a way that is helpful to you.
I've been working this into my rhythm, either last thing at night, sometimes with Greg, or first thing in the morning to look back on the previous day and it's been so helpful at creating space for me to notice God in my life and the gifts in my life.
I’ve been using an app called Pray as You go which you can download. Its great because someone else walks you through it and you just listen to them and follow their lead. And its just 8 minutes long.
I’m going to walk us through this now, and this one does have more of a focus on gifts.
There are five sections for the examen, and we’ll spend about two minutes on each section. But feel free to stay in a section if it is helpful to you – this is not about getting through all five steps, but about you meeting with God, noticing Him and savouring Him:
Ten minutes of examen
I’m going to ask the band to come back up.
We have had a little time to examine our lives, to notice and pay attention to God and His many gifts. If you would like to know more about the Examen, we have some prayer cards at the front that you can come and collect after the service, but also come and chat to me if you want more information about adopting the practice of the examen.
Expressing gratitude and love is important as it deepens our connection to others. So we are now going to sing, and offer our love and affection and gratitude to the God who gives us so much in Jesus, and who wants our love in return.