03 Dec Organized, Yet Totally Random, Jesus Thoughts at Christmastime

This Fresh Start violates one of the basic tenets of writing and public speaking: “The one thing.” Regardless of how many points you have in a piece of communication, they should all point back to a single concept or thought. The “one thing” in this case is that all these points are random. But they are not unrelated. They are all random thoughts about Jesus, inspired in part by other writers:

• God came as a baby because He would rather die a brutal death on earth than live in Heaven without you (Inspired by the Max Lucado devotional: “Ponder the Love of God.”). In Ephesians 3, the Apostle Paul prays for believers in Ephesus, that they would truly grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” Does anything truly capture the magnitude of God’s love for you more than the reality stated above? Jesus left heaven, became a baby, and died an unthinkably brutal death. Why? Because He preferred that experience to experiencing Heaven without you. If you struggle with “how wide and long and high and deep,” I encourage you to focus on that random thought this Christmas season.
• “The way we love difficult people lets everyone know that a baby in the manger isn’t just a decoration.”—Bob Goff. If Christmas is truly about Christ, the Jesus in us should be a much brighter display than the one in the nativity scene in the front yard.

• “To dwell on my inabilities and inadequacies is not humility, it is an insult to God. To complain over our incompetence is to accuse God of falsely overlooking us. Humility is “Thank God I know I am saved and sanctified.”—Oswald Chambers. At Christmastime we remember the sacrifice Jesus made for us, both in coming as an infant and dying a brutal death. He did that so we wouldn’t have to rely on our own power and abilities to comply with His will for our lives. For our motives to be pure in all that we do, Jesus must be the motive for everything that we do. After all, we were the motive for what Jesus did.

Random unconnected thoughts with one common denominator: the immeasurable love built into the arrival of Jesus on earth. His journey from cradle to cross begins in Bethlehem. Let us pray that we fully grasp this Christmas season just how big a deal that was and is.