Craig D. Lounsbrough

Jesus came to give us life without leaving out any of life in the giving.

It would be infinitely more prudent to be a single __avid_ standing with God, than a million __oliath___ standing without Him.

God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave.

What insanity propels me to incessantly invest in a world that never ceases to fail me? And what ignorance bewitches me so thoroughly that it keeps me from investing in a God who never ceases to be unfailing?

I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.

The most elusive and ultimately impossible act of liberation is freedom from sin and self, and no document or declaration of man regardless of how exquisitely penned can do that. Such an astonishing act of liberation could only have been penned in one place: the cross.

Denial is a seductive ruse of our own making, force-fitting our agendas by forcing out truth all because we bent to fear rather than bowed to God.

At this moment God might not necessarily be a necessity, but know that His absence will of necessity eventually result in His necessity.

To keep my life free of evil I must of necessity keep my life full of God, for keeping my life full of anything else will give evil everything else.

The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this.

For once in my life maybe I ought to actually think about taking God at His word, and in doing so to suddenly find myself riotously welcoming the rather shocking reality that Christmas is truly everything that He says it is.

What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love.

We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort.

It__ not so much about writing the story of Christmas itself, as ingenious as it is. In reality, it__ much more about writing the story of Christmas into the story of life so that it will become the story of life.

This is the wonder of Christmas, that in the solitary form of an impoverished infant God has handed me everything that I could never create so that I can be everything that I could never be.

Today I must look in the mirror and be thankful for the person who I find staring back at me. For although the reflection is terribly imperfect, and I know that full well, God created it with enough room that one day it would be perfect. And if there is nothing else I can find to be thankful for, let me begin here.

I would like to say that I__ sacrificial. But am I sacrificial enough to acknowledge the fact that I__ not?

The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth.