"For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?" Matthew 5:46-47
Let's all admit it. There is one part of this Advent season, leading up to Christmas, that so many of us genuinely dislike. I will call it the Sense of Obligation. Here is what it looks like. You get your Christmas cards all printed out and in the mail. Suddenly the next day, you get a card in the mail from someone to whom you didn't send a card. What do you do? For many of us, we feel this sense of obligation to send them a card. After all, we can't have it seeming that we mean more to them than they mean to us, right?
Sure, this is something we deal with throughout the year, but this time of year it seems to hit particularly strongly. If you get a gift from someone, don't you almost feel obligated to get them on in return? (And think, the concept of a gift is that it is something given without any sense of return on the part of the person receiving it. So if you are giving a gift with the expectation that you will get one in return, you aren't really giving a gift. You are giving an obligation, a debt, that you are expecting to be repaid.) During this season, though, with the giving of many gifts and the catching up of the year, it seems to hit particularly powerfully.
As you read the verses above from Jesus' sermon on the mount, you kind of get a sense of what He thought of these kinds of obligation. He just doesn't seem to be that fond of them. After all, it doesn't show any kind of compassion toward others, since they don't really need what you are giving them. It's easy to love those who love you. But what about those who give you trouble, or who are thorns in your side? It's easy to greet the people who are friendly to you, but what about that person that shuns you, or the kind of person that you may be afraid of, or that you are suspicious of? That truly starts to intrude into the realm of grace, which should show us something, since grace does make us uneasy in just how stringless it really is.
Just imagine adding a line like this to your card next year. "If you are getting this, and you didn't have us on your list, please do not feel obligated to send something back. We are simply wanting to share our life with you, and are glad that you are part of it, even if you may not share that same sense of connectedness." True, this sense of obligation is so ingrained in us that the person receiving it probably would still feel obligated to send something back, but it gets back to the whole "freely sharing" of oneself, which is really what Christmas is all about, Jesus freely giving of Himself to make us right with God.
Let's all admit it. There is one part of this Advent season, leading up to Christmas, that so many of us genuinely dislike. I will call it the Sense of Obligation. Here is what it looks like. You get your Christmas cards all printed out and in the mail. Suddenly the next day, you get a card in the mail from someone to whom you didn't send a card. What do you do? For many of us, we feel this sense of obligation to send them a card. After all, we can't have it seeming that we mean more to them than they mean to us, right?
Sure, this is something we deal with throughout the year, but this time of year it seems to hit particularly strongly. If you get a gift from someone, don't you almost feel obligated to get them on in return? (And think, the concept of a gift is that it is something given without any sense of return on the part of the person receiving it. So if you are giving a gift with the expectation that you will get one in return, you aren't really giving a gift. You are giving an obligation, a debt, that you are expecting to be repaid.) During this season, though, with the giving of many gifts and the catching up of the year, it seems to hit particularly powerfully.
As you read the verses above from Jesus' sermon on the mount, you kind of get a sense of what He thought of these kinds of obligation. He just doesn't seem to be that fond of them. After all, it doesn't show any kind of compassion toward others, since they don't really need what you are giving them. It's easy to love those who love you. But what about those who give you trouble, or who are thorns in your side? It's easy to greet the people who are friendly to you, but what about that person that shuns you, or the kind of person that you may be afraid of, or that you are suspicious of? That truly starts to intrude into the realm of grace, which should show us something, since grace does make us uneasy in just how stringless it really is.
Just imagine adding a line like this to your card next year. "If you are getting this, and you didn't have us on your list, please do not feel obligated to send something back. We are simply wanting to share our life with you, and are glad that you are part of it, even if you may not share that same sense of connectedness." True, this sense of obligation is so ingrained in us that the person receiving it probably would still feel obligated to send something back, but it gets back to the whole "freely sharing" of oneself, which is really what Christmas is all about, Jesus freely giving of Himself to make us right with God.
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