“And now abides faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (I Corinthians 13:13)
Do you know what it is like to live your life, day in and day out, without hope? In the great love chapter of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul tells us three eternal values in life are faith, hope and love. Hope is one of the three eternal values because hope brings us to the faith that brings us to God. In the heart of every human being, God plants hope, the conviction that something good exists in this life and someday that good will intersect our lives. That is what the author of the Book of Hebrews means when he tells us that faith gives substance to the things for which we have been hoping. (Hebrews 11:1)
As followers of Jesus Christ, we have Good News that can give hope to the hopeless. If we never share the Good News of the Christmas that was and the Christmas that shall be, we should ask ourselves if we really believe the Gospel of Christmas. If we really believe in the Christmas that was, we should share that Good News with the people Jesus told us He came to seek and to save. (Luke 19:10) We show that we believe in the Christmas that shall be, when we tell hopeless people that God is going to give us another Christmas.
Like the wise men, we should ask the question, “Where is He?,” seek Him until we find Him, and then worship Him and give the gift of our lives to Him. Then, like the shepherds we should tell everybody the Good News that Christmas has come and Christmas is coming again to this otherwise hopeless world.
Dick Woodward, from A Christmas Prescription