Love's Cost

While Hope's Candle continues to steadily burn with promise of Christ's coming, Love's Candle, wick expectant, sparks into existence.
Children's eyes widen in delight as that which was unseen is pushed aside, replaced by Love's soft glow.

When Christ came to earth, and became flesh, His coming provided a way through the darkness, a way back to our beloved creator.

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2. He was in the beginning with God. 3. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
                                                               ~John 1:1-5

Candle's light flickers in small circle of warmth, casting shadows on upturned faces and wandering eyes. Distractions linger in murkiness of surrounding room threatening to extingish Word's illumination.

 
Father, don't let the darkness steal my child's understanding...

 

It was God's love that sent Jesus that night to Bethlehem. It was God keeping His promise to Adam, and Abraham that their offspring would crush the Serpent's head and destroy the curse of sin.

 Help them to be convinced of the uniqueness of Christ, their only hope for the cure of sin disease....

Christians have historically confessed the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. We believe nothing less than the incarnate Son of God in whom the fullness of the diety dwells in human form, the fully divine and the fully human-the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
                                                    ~John R. Frank

But God's love came with a cost. He must have felt both the joy and the pain of the Christ coming. He knows what it's like for us to have moments of bliss and others of brokenness.            

After all..... the manger led to the cross.

Redemption is a greater work even than creation, and especially when we consider the way in which God has achieved it, even through the sending of His only Begotten Son into this world in all the marvel and the wonder and the miracle of the Incarnation, but above all in delivering Him up to the Death upon the Cross. This is the supreme thing – that sinful fallen man can be redeemed and restored, and ultimately the whole of creation also.

                                                         ~Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

He understands..that is why we can come to Him…the One who came for us. He knows us fully and loves us deeply. He celebrates, comforts, calls us each by name.

If we want proof of God’s love for us, then we must look first at the Cross where God offered up His Son as a sacrifice for our sins. Calvary is the one objective, absolute, irrefutable proof of God’s love for us.
                                                       ~Jerry Bridges

Lord, help my children to realize that there is nothing more essential to their lives than the incarnation.....

Help us to live out the Truth; Jesus is not one of many ways to approach God, nor is He the best of several ways; He is the only way.

 May the Advent of the Christ waiting expose our depravity and proclaim the Christ Light sent to the world to show us the only way out of darkness.

Always Seeking Higher Ground,

Nora