The gift

My late parents were both doctors and during the Christmas season we normally got a lot of gifts from grateful patients. The most popular gift at that time was the fruit cake. We got so many fruit cakes, we ended up having fruit cake for dessert way beyond the holiday season.

We had this big freezer and anything that looks like a fruit cake ended up automatically in the freezer, gift wrapped as received. One day, we didn’t have dessert, so my Dad said we could get one of those frozen fruit cakes.

The helper went to get the fruit cake from the freezer. But when we removed the gift wrapping and opened it, lo and behold it wasn’t a fruit cake, but a transistor radio in a fruitcake box.

Because no one bothered to unwrap the gift and just threw it in the freezer, a transistor radio was in cold storage for most of the year. Luckily, it still worked when we needed it during a typhoon.

Journalists get a lot of gifts too on Christmas, and that makes many of us as jaded as my family was about fruit cakes. There are times when many of my gifts remain unopened way beyond the Christmas season.

Lack of appreciation? Not really. It doesn’t help that the Christmas season is a very busy one. There are so many get-togethers to attend, so many gifts to buy that may end up in someone’s freezer. Maybe we just take Christmas gifts for granted in a season of plenty.

The Christmas season had, after all, become more of a cultural tradition. The real meaning of the celebration has been lost through the years. So we go through the motions of having a good time with family and friends, exchange gifts and stagger on to the New Year.

Gifts are taken for granted as part of the season’s traditions. We keep some gifts still wrapped in some closet (or freezer), with the thought of opening it one day out of curiosity or need.

Unfortunately, we do that too to the most important gift there is on Christmas Day… not the gold, frankincense and myrrh… but the Child in the manger that the angels were singing about on that first Christmas night. 

God, who went through all the trouble of sending us His own Son as His gift to all the people of the world, must feel disappointed and rejected because we never take the time to unwrap and appreciate the most precious gift of all, Christmas after Christmas.

Here is what the evangelical pastor Rick Warren had to say about this gift:

“It is astounding that so many people have celebrated Christmas every year of their lives without ever having opened their greatest and most expensive Christmas gift. Jesus Christ is God’s Christmas gift to you.

“Wrapped up in Jesus are all the benefits and blessings and so much more. In Jesus your past is forgiven, you get a purpose for living and you get a home in heaven. Why celebrate Christmas if you’re not going to open the best gift of all?”

And it is all about grace. Jesus came down to earth offering us salvation, a free gift of God’s grace. Pastor Rick explains some more:

“The idea of grace is so foreign and antithetical to the popular misconceptions about God and even other religions that when the Bible talks about salvation as a free gift of God’s grace, many people respond with a blank stare…

“We are so used to receiving conditional love (“I will love you if…” or “I love you because…”) that unconditional grace is an unfamiliar and even uncomfortable concept…

“The big idea behind all religions is that you must work, strive, and put forth great effort in order to get God to like you.

“So God came to earth as Jesus essentially to say: ‘You guys have got it all wrong! Of course doing good things matters, but it doesn’t make me love you any more or any less. My love for you is unlimited, unconditional, unchanging and undeserved.

“‘So let me teach you a new concept called grace. You can’t purchase it, work for it, or be good enough to merit it. It’s a gift that will cost me a lot, but it is free to you. Everything I do for you, to you, in you and through you – every single blessing you have in life – is a gift of my grace. I’ve done it all for you.’”

On that first Christmas night, Jesus brought us salvation. Salvation, as Pastor Rick points out, “is not a matter of trying, but trusting. It’s not a matter of proving you deserve it, but accepting it by faith, knowing you don’t deserve it.”

This Christmas, open the best gift there is for this season… the gift of Jesus Christ coming into our world so our sins can be forgiven and we can enjoy eternity in the company of our loving God.

Merry Christmas to all our readers.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco