The Best Gift

 

“If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

—Luke 11:13

As a young child in elementary school, I remember waiting with eager anticipation for the arrival in early November of the Sears’ Christmas Catalog. I would spend hours looking at the many pages of toys trying to decide which toy I should request as my one Christmas gift.

We were like many middle class families in those post-World War II days. We had very modest means. It was a real sacrifice to buy gifts. I had learned never to expect the kind of showering of gifts that children seem to receive today.

One gift—one carefully chosen gift for which to study and compare and dream about and finally to humbly request. Then, the wait until Christmas Day began.

In our home, the gifts were a relatively minor part of Christmas. We spent far more time talking about and celebrating Jesus’ birth. Our Savior is born—God with us.

But always, in the back of my mind, as I sat looking at that Sears’ Christmas Catalog was the hopeful expectation that on Christmas Day I would receive the gift I had requested.

Jesus understood the importance of the very best gift His disciples needed if they were to go out and help change the world. That’s why He spoke these words, as recorded in Luke 11:13:

“If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

This day we can go out and help change the world in behalf of Christ because the Holy Spirit dwells within us. The Spirit leads us and guides us. He helps us and protects us. He makes the way laid out before us passable, no matter what barrier Satan tries to place in our pathway.

Let us humbly thank God for this very best gift of His Spirit. And, let us go out into our world ready to help defeat the evil that strives to destroy it.

 

_{Copyright © 2016 by Dean K. Wilson. All Rights Reserved.}

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