Thursday After Christmas, 12/28/00

John 1: 4, 5 In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. --NIV

In the name of the One Who is Life and Light, amen.

I presently live in Southwest Florida, and about the only thing that made it feel like Christmas in Florida was the lights that people hung on the palm trees. That is a fact for me even though, as someone said to me, I live in a climate that is much more like the climate that Christ was born into, than the showy Midwest that I grew up in.

Lights and Christmas go hand in hand. It is a universal concept; it is a Christian concept. But even though the secular world testifies to the birth of Christ by the lights it hangs up, most of the world does not really understand the Light. The secular world celebrates the birth of Christ in its own way, and with at least a grain of truth, but it has no idea of the profoundness of the occasion.

We live in darkness; we are darkness. We had fear-of the unknown, or what we could not see. And Christ the Light of the World came and lit up the darkness. He drove away the fear of the Great Unknown by making Him known to us. Christ Jesus allowed us to look at God the way a very dark lens allows us to look at the sun. Christ Jesus filters the glory of God through the dark lens of His human nature and allows us to look God in the face. Do we really understand? We do a little bit now. We will understand fully when He returns and the lens is no longer dark, but clear as it was from the beginning. Amen.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, You are light and life. You are the exact image of the unseen God. Fill us with Your light and drive out all darkness from us. Make us alive by the life that is in You. Show us the glory of God in You so that we may understand the Light, and glorify the Father through You in the Spirit, amen.

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