Christmas Unwrapped - 2 - A Gift Worth Waiting For

So this week is the second and final part of our Christmas series, Christmas Unwrapped.

Last week we were looking at the build up to Christmas and the prophecies and predictions of Jesus birth. This week we are going to look at why Jesus’s birth is the world’s best gift.

Last week we saw that Jesus birth had been predicted for thousands of years before his Birth. We saw that prophets such as Micah, Zechariah, Hosea and Isiah had all heard details from God about where and how Jesus birth would happen.

Now we are going to read in Luke 2 : 1 - 21 the details about the actual birth itself. This might be a story that is familiar to you, but there is still so much that we can get out of familiar stories.

It is very easy for us to gloss over this story and see it as being a cute tale with a warm stable, fury animals and a warm fuzzy glow.

However, as we see from the passage it was a lot tougher than that. If we begin with simply thinking about the journey that Mary and Joseph had to take. We know that they travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem on foot and by donkey. But how far do you think they had to travel?

The journey was about 80 miles. That is the equivalent of you walking out of this building (in St Albans) and carrying on walking all the way to Dover, Gloucester or Birmingham.

They were not hardened travellers, but teenagers, around your age. Think how scary it would be travelling on foot across the country… while also being very pregnant and on the verge of giving birth.

On top of that you are travelling to a place where you have no hotel rooms booked, so you have no idea where you will be spending the night. Then when you do eventually find somewhere, it is a gross shed full of animals.

How would you feel if you were in their shoes?

The Christmas story is no fairy tale it involved some real hardship and bravery for them to accomplish God’s plan.

Before we start thinking about why Jesus is a gift to the world it might be worth thinking about what a gift really is. In your teams you have a puzzle each which contains a dictionary definition of a gift.

We see that a gift is something that is freely given, is not paid for or earned by the receiver. Instead it is given out of love by the giver.

What presents are you hoping to receive this Christmas?

Although all the gifts we have talked about are great, the gift that God gave us all beats them all hands down.

He chose to give the world his one and only son, to live on the Earth as a human. To experience life as a human, with all of the ups and downs that this involves.

Ultimately God sent him to die like a human too. However his death was temporary. He rose to life again three days later. His life death and resurrection is the one gift we can rely on to give us hope. We see this mentioned in John 3 : 16 - 19.

This is the one thing which gives us a future. Out of all the presents you give and receive this Christmas spare a thought for the little baby Jesus who grew up into the man who changed everything forever.

Although the nativity was a historical event that took place thousands of years ago, the meaning and significance of it is still very much relevant today.

In our modern lives it can sometimes be hard for us to relate to the characters in the story.

So what you are going to do is re-create a nativity scene, but only using modern characters, which you are going to create and arrange on the tables.

Although the nativity took place a long time ago it is still significant to us today.

Getting gifts is one thing, but in order to get the benefit from them we need to use them. We are going to play a game of pass the parcel, but with a twist…

We are going to pass the parcel around and you will pass it around as normal when the music is playing. But when it stops rather than removing a layer of paper what you are going to do is say a way in which you could use your gift of Jesus to bless other people.

The gift of Jesus’s birth, life and death was a gift to us from God so that we can live in relationship with him. It is a gift that we should share with others as well.