God Teaches Us to Give
An astounding thing happened just over 2000 years ago. Our Father sent His only Son away from the wonder and majesty and safety of heaven to the earth He had created.
God didn’t give Jesus a message to write in the clouds. He didn’t send Him on a short-term mission trip.
God sent His Son to become a human being, to suffer like a human being, and in the end to die like a human being.
A few months ago, Ray and I sat in a courtyard in North Carolina, having lunch. The food was good but the service was slow. As we waited, I watched an older lady and a 20-something younger woman eat together. I imagined them as mother and daughter or perhaps grandmother and granddaughter. On the table was perhaps the most beautiful purse I had ever seen. It appeared to be a gift from the older woman to the younger one. If someone told me that the price tag was $1000, I would not have questioned it.
Many gifts from one person to another are extremely generous, but the gift that God gave to us all those years ago is truly beyond what we could ask or imagine. To give the gift of an only child–for the God of the Universe to give the gift of His only child, knowing that that child would die a cruel death before coming back home to be with His Father–reveals a love that could only come from the God Who is love.
And for that Child to come willingly, knowing fully what would happen when He did . . .
Father, thank You for sending.
Jesus, thank You for coming.
Help us give like You.
Have this attitude in yourselves
which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, although He existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant,
and being made in the likeness of men.
Being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8