Daily Devotional • December 25
Christmas Day
A Reading from 1 John 4:7-16
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. 15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16 So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
Meditation
Merry Christmas, friends! Today we remember the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, God who came into his created world as the most vulnerable kind of human: a baby born into poverty.
The reading from 1 John reminds us that the birth of Jesus is first and foremost an act of God’s boundless love. God’s love for us is so vast that he not only willingly enters the pain and hardship of human life, but in so entering our way of being, upturns everything that has ever gone wrong in the entirety of existence. And all for our sakes.
Of course, even on a celebratory day like Christmas, it’s still difficult to feel the enormity of God’s love for us. This is perhaps one reason John says that the best way to dwell within the mystery of God’s love is not to try to see him — or, we might say, to understand him in his totality — but to love one another. By loving one another, we become like God, who is love. And the more we become like God, the more we deepen our relationship with him. After all, we are not meant to comprehend him, but to love him in return.
And what image best represents a relationship of love towards a being we can’t even begin to fully comprehend? Perhaps a newborn baby, whom we can’t help but love, in his innocence and beauty — whose sudden existence in the world we can never understand, whom we can only look at in wonder and awe.
Elizabeth Hamilton’s writing has appeared in the Dallas Museum of Art, Southern Humanities Review, and Texas Monthly. She has an MFA from Seattle Pacific University. Find her work at elizabethannehamilton.com
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Kumasi – The Church of the Province of West Africa
Society of Mary, American Region
