Our Daily Bread Christmas: Gift Of Grace / Day 1

Our Daily Bread Christmas: Gift Of Grace

Day 1 of 10 The Christ of Christmas. Christmas is wet in Singapore. It doesn’t snow; it rains. Growing up in a non-Christian family, we didn’t celebrate Christmas. But when I was young, my siblings and I, together with a few neighborhood kids, decided to have a Christmas gift exchange. I don’t know where we got the idea—maybe from all the TV shows we’d been watching. We put our names into a bag, and each of us picked the name of someone to buy a present for. Some of us were happy with the gifts we received, some of us were not; but we were all glad to have received presents. We didn’t realize the perfect gift had been given to us 2,000 years ago by God our Creator. The Bible tells us, “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). When I was a teenager, I heard about this gift and accepted Jesus as my Savior. I remember celebrating my first Christmas as a believer in Christ. Christmas was special now because I finally understood it’s meaning—it’s a celebration of God’s perfect gift, Jesus Christ. I realized that God is not a mystical force out there; He is a personal God who loves people of all nations and socioeconomic classes. And this personal God expressed His love for me by dying for me. During this festive season—and always—may we continue to fix our eyes on the Christ of Christmas. —Poh Fang Chia At Bethlehem, God demonstrated that to love is to give. John 3:16-21 John 3:16-21 NKJV 16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. 18 “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.  19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.  20For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.  21 But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”