The Greatest Love Story - 1st John 3:1 (Christmas Eve Reflection)


I can’t tell you the number of romantic Hallmark Christmas love stories that Anita and I watch every year.  We enjoy spending that time together while we are wrapping presents or while I am typing bulletins or putting our Sunday slideshows together.  However, while all those movies are fictitious, the true Christmas Story is also a love story, it is the beginning of the Greatest Love story, and we are part of that love story, we are the reason for the love story.
So my Brothers and Sisters, we find ourselves tonight in the midst of the Greatest Love Story ever told…a story that began when God said “Let there be light,” and won’t conclude until we see Jesus’ fulfillment of “Surely I am coming soon.” 
Hear again the words of John, as related to us from Eugene Peterson’s The Message paraphrase of the Bible: “What marvelous love the Father has extended to us! Just look at it—we’re called children of God! That’s who we really are. But that’s also why the world doesn’t recognize us or take us seriously, because it has no idea who he is or what he’s up to.”
Tonight we gather to acknowledge that we are recipients of the greatest Christmas present ever given, and that is that we have been made part of this love story.  We celebrate tonight that God so loved the world that He gave His Only Son that all, that each one of us, and each person throughout the world, who believe in him, might not perish, might not live a life without love, but that we might have eternal life…that we might know what it means to be part of a love story that ever ends…to be loved with a love that does not even part with death, because with that love, we don’t even experience the death, because we have received not only eternal life, but also love everlasting.
God has loved us enough that He has not only given us life, but that He has called us His children.  He has made us His sons and daughters.  We are heirs, with Christ, of the Kingdom of God.  We are the recipients and heirs of perfect love.  And as God’s Children, like Christ, what is true of God, is to be true of us, it is to become part of our spiritual DNA…we are called to continue to tell the Love Story, to offer the same love to all around us that God has offered to us.  As God’s children, we are to be the bearers of that Divine, Agape, Sacrificial Love for the sake of offering life and hope to those who continue to find themselves in the darkness.
We are to continue sharing the story in this world that does not recognize that we are children of God…that does not recognize that God has poured His love into the world through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of His Son…that does not recognize that God loves them just as much and desires that they embrace living as Children of Love as well.  It comes to us to share the story with them…to live out the story in our lives each day, loving them with the same love with which God has loved us…to let them know that they are part of the greatest love story…that they are the reason for the greatest love story…that we and they are the whole reason for Christmas.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…Amen!

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