The Gift Devotional

The Gift Devotional written by staff and members of Temple Baptist Church is available for download online.  You can download a free PDF copy of the devotional guide here. We will also have weekly sermons that go along with the devotional.  You can download or listen to those from the church website.

This project was put together and edited by Anna Emily and Christopher Wright.  Christopher includes this introduction to the devotional:

Dueling Christmases

”For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9

The Christmas season has always had a bizarre bipolarness to it for me. It wasn’t until several years ago that I really started to notice that I celebrate two very distinct and very different Christmases depending on where I was and who I was with and it started to bother me.

I thought about it so much that I even named my two Christmases. There was “Secular” Christmas and then there was “Sacred” Christmas. The reason for the holiday’s bipolarness is that they aren’t really compatible with each other. I went so far as to create a graphic organizer (that’s what we call it in elementary education land) so that I could better see the differences between the two.  It went something like this:

Upon study of my graphic organizer, I could clearly see how divergent these two Christmases were. There was a friction between my two Christmases. One was about self, and stuff, and people who give me stuff, while the other was the humble beginnings of God’s perfect son, Jesus Christ. One of them was basically focused on me and what I get and the other was focused on Jesus.

One secular Christmas song even makes fun of the me-centric secular Christmas
in a song called The Christmas Can-Can:

Christmas, Christmas time is here, and Christmas songs you love to hear
Thoughts of joy and hope and cheer, but mostly shopping, shopping, shopping!
Christmas. Christmas time is here, the sleigh bells and red nosed deer
Songs and songs we love to hear all played a thousand times each year
Heard this same song 20 times and it’s only Halloween
It’s not even cold outside Christmas,
Christmas time is here, and Christmas songs you love to hear
Thoughts of joy and hope and cheer, but mostly shopping, shopping, shopping!

This brought me to a point of decision. Were these dueling versions of Christmas healthy to have? Did one distract from the other? Even worse, was one destructive to what I know the Christmas season is all about? Tough questions because I love both Christmases! I love the snow, the lights, the trees, the songs and I love the story of the baby in the manger, the carols. I didn’t want to give either Christmas up.

I did however, notice that there was one similar item on my list. Gifts. Sure the giving of gifts came from two totally different perspectives but that was one element both Christmases shared. So this Christmas season we are going to focus, not on gifts, but the Gift. Not the giving of gifts to our friends and family (and the debt that typically accompanies those gifts), but on the gift of Jesus, what that gift is and develop a better
understanding of how the gift affects each one of us. As you are reading and studying this week, our topics won’t bring images of sugar plums dancing in your head. It won’t make you think of a wintery scene painted by Thomas Kinkade. These topics are designed to bring a better understanding of how the gift of Christ works in your life and the lives of our Christian brothers and sisters.

So may you, this Christmas season, grow in knowledge of the purpose of the baby’s arrival on that
Christmas morning and like me, I pray that you wrestle with the appropriate balance in the dichotomy of our modern day Christmases.

Feel free to download a copy of the devotional for yourself.  Hope you enjoy it!