Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: December 15

“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” ~ 1 John 4:10

For years and years I sang the beloved Christmas carol “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and sang right past the ling “God and sinners reconciled” as though it had nothing more to do with me than the line about Yankee Doodle sticking a feather in his hat!

Herein was love. But I [Eugenia Price, the author] didn’t know it. There in that manger lay love. But I didn’t know it.

The point is not whether or not we love God. The point is that God loved us so much that He came Himself to become sin for us. “For God so loved the world that he … sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Christmas carols still mean little more than peaceful feelings, and a vague, general form of goodwill to most people in this same world which God loved enough to die for. To many they are colorful sacred folk songs sung in celebration of an ancient legend about a baby and its mother and some wise men who saw a star and brought gifts in pretty oriental brass urns and caskets lined with silk. But therein that night lay love.

There in that manger in the Person of the Christ child. The baby “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” But I sang “God and sinners reconciled” and didn’t know what I was singing! I might have shuddered and thought you unpleasant if you had reminded me that those same little baby hands were nailed to a Cross for me thirty-three years later. There in the manger lay love. But this Christmas, remember that also there on the Cross hung love.

“…Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”