I remember submitting a poem to my corporate Christmas newsletter and it made the third page. I tried to go through the process of explaining what Christmas really was.
It surprised me for a moment, but with more thought, I knew this was probably normal thinking - in Mongolia. Someone responded to a radio program and shared their thoughts on Christmas like this --
"When I think of Christmas the first thing that comes into my mind is its significance, especially in relation to the lives of myself and those about me. I think of what Christmas originally cost, of what its significance costs myself and others today."Oswald Chambers, in the first of the daily devotions in My Utmost for His Highest, shares this same attitude of complete surrender to God --
"I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and for Him alone."Giving yourself in true abandonment to Him means refusing yourself the luxury of asking questions. We have no ends of our own to serve. In fact, it never produces the consciousness of its own effort, because the whole life is taken up with the one to whom we abandon ourselves. He then works through us all the time.
"One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is the excuse of temperament. We make our temperament and our natural affinities barriers to coming to Jesus. The first thing we realize when we come to Jesus is that He pays no attention whatever to our natural affinities. We have the notion that we can consecrate our gifts to God. You cannot consecrate what is not yours; there is only one thing you can consecrate to God, and that is your right to yourself." (Romans 12:1)...I don’t throw my life away, but I willingly and deliberately lay it down for Him and His interests in other people. And I do this for no cause or purpose of my own. Paul spent his life for only one purpose— that he might win people to Jesus Christ. Paul always attracted people to his Lord, but never to himself. He said, “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). Chambers
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