Soon it will be Christmas morning,
Cards and gifts around the tree;
But will you treasure, will you worship
Jesus born to set us free?
Cards and gifts around the tree;
But will you treasure, will you worship
Jesus born to set us free?
I am a big fan of the
giving and receiving of presents. It is an opportunity to give those you love
something they like. It is a way of saying to someone ‘I appreciate you’. Our
family Christmas day is a great and multi-dimensional day, but the centrepiece
for me is undoubtedly the present giving ceremony (yes, even ahead of dinner!)
Yet in buying our gifts,
we can easily get weighed down under a sense of burden and duty. And in
receiving, more of our emotion can settle on what the gift is rather than the
fact someone having given it to us. The corporeal outweighs the symbolic; the
actualised trumps the theoretical.
This song reminds us that
cherishing material things is not the right path to walk at Christmas. And good
as it is to cherish the heart of the giving exchange, the writer exhorts to go
further than this still, and adore the One whose birth we give these gifts in
remembrance of. And when we remember that Jesus was indeed ‘born to set us
free’, why would we not treasure Him above all things this Christmas time?
On a Dark Night (link to lyrics only, sorry no YouTube available) - by Paul Oakley.
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