马槽之旅：将临期25天灵修指南预览

 The Birth Was the Beginning

The message of Christmas doesn’t end with the tiny baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We must remember the reason that baby was born. The full message of Christmas is that eternal God came to earth as a man to save His own creation. That tiny baby in swaddling clothes came for a purpose: He came to die.

Those tiny infant hands that twitched and worked themselves out of their wrappings within a rough wooden feeding trough were the very same carpenter’s hands that later were nailed to a rugged, wooden cross. They were the same hands that, though scarred, carefully folded His own burial wrappings after defeating sin and death so that He might give us eternal life. And they are the same hands that lovingly reach down and pick us up over and over again throughout this often-difficult life.

This Christmas season, when all seems so hurried and harried, don’t get caught up in the busyness and materialism.

Activity: Make something with your hands—a card, a drawing, a craft—and give it to someone as a spontaneous gift.