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If the preaching of the Gospel was central to the ministry of Jesus, we dare not suffer under the delusion that we are being faithful to His example if we fail to preach the Gospel today. As Christians, we are called to preach the good news, if not as part of a formal call to ministry then as a part of our everyday interactions with friends and family. It is also important to encourage those pastors who labor in the faithful exposition of God’s Word.
Paul confessed that only through the saving grace of Jesus did he receive eternal life. Because Paul was aware of the depth of his sinfulness (he had been a persecutor of Christ’s followers), he was especially sensitive to the abundant grace Jesus had “poured out” on his behalf (1 Timothy 1:14). Through Jesus, God made the supreme sacrifice to deliver this staggering grace to sinners like us and Paul.
Jesus’ voluntary sacrifice on our behalf demonstrates a key attribute of God: grace. While mercy refers to what God doesn’t give that we do deserve (punishment), grace refers to what God gives that we don’t deserve (life with him for eternity). Throughout Jewish history, God showed his mercy by giving his people more chances to avoid judgment. Ultimately, he showed the extent of his grace by offering his own Son as a substitute for the sin of all humankind.
Jesus graciously and voluntarily became the substitute that paid the punishment for humankind’s unholy rebellion against God. In this way, Jesus’ death also shows another key attribute of God: his love (see John 3:16). Jesus extends to the undeserving- to Paul and to each of us- the very grace of God, which is evidence that Jesus is indeed the Son of God.
I’m beyond tired�physically, emotionally and mentally.
I could go on and on. But then I would be beyond depressed.
When feeling like this, I realize I have to get my mind out of the gutter and anchor myself on God’s promises.
I have to be intentional to focus on a different set of “beyond” statements or I quickly find myself in a pit. I know this from experience. Even if the “beyond” statements above are true, there are others that are also true.
I am beyond blessed:From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.John 1:16*
I am beyond strong:Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.Joshua 1:9
I am beyond secure:Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.John 14:27
I am beyond safe:Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes, with your right hand you save me.Psalm 138:7
I am beyond hopeful:“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”Jeremiah 29:11
I am beyond loved:But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.Psalm 13:5
I am beyond valued:For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.John 3:16
I am beyond forgiven:Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”Luke 7:48
I am beyond found:Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.”Luke 15:4-6
I am beyond complete:So you also are complete through your union with Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority.Colossians 2:10 (NLT)
I can’t trust my feelings, or even circumstances, to tell me how I am. They change like the wind. Up one moment and easily shot down the next. His Word however, never changes. Its ceaseless truths go beyond emotions and whatever my day holds to anchor me to hope.
Some days, weeks or even seasons of life are discouraging and we can’t see beyond the pain, hurt and stress. Searching God’s Word for His view of our circumstances and us lifts our eyes off the problems and onto Him. He’s our ultimate source of truth and encouragement!
Dear Lord, thank You for recording Your Word for me to reflect on and find truth in. Thank You for giving hope and peace beyond my feelings and circumstances. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Matthew 4:2-4 “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (v. 4).
Having come into the world to save His people (Matt. 1:21), Jesus begins His ministry when He identifies with God’s chosen, Israel, in His baptism and follows the Spirit into the wilderness to face Satan (3:13-4:1). In the desert, Jesus shows Himself to be the new Israel, the second Adam and true Son of God, so that His disciples can be adopted as the Father’s children ( John 1:9-13).
When the Devil comes to Jesus in today’s passage, the Messiah has been “fasting forty days and forty nights” and is obviously hungry (Matt. 4:2). This reveals the hard place in which Jesus finds Himself. Scripture often associates forty days and nights with difficult circumstances. For example, Elijah endured the same period without food while on the run from Ahab and Jezebel ( 1 Kings 19:1-8). The setting of Jesus’ testing is similarly arduous and presents a challenge that Adam, who lived in Eden’s bliss, never faced.
Satan wants Jesus to turn from His vocation as the Suffering Servant when he challenges Him to turn stones to bread (Matt. 4:3). We know this to be true because the Devil’s challenge is just like the one the crowd hurls at Jesus in Matthew 27:40, where the people mock Him, calling upon Him to come down from the cross. Of course, doing this would mean that Jesus distrusts both His Father’s promises to save the elect through His death and to vindicate His Son’s affliction (Isa. 53). Jesus has been sent into the desert to endure fasting and suffering until His appointed time (Matt. 4:1 ). To seek sustenance contrary to God’s appointment would repeat the mistake of Israel who was similarly tested for faithfulness (Deut. 8:1-3) and disobeyed when they grumbled and refused to follow the Lord’s directions when He sent manna from heaven (Ex. 16).
Yet Christ refuses to use His divine power to circumvent His task of suffering service. He is not willing to stuff His belly and stand before the Father emptied of righteousness. Jesus will be satisfied to eat the food given Him – doing the will of God (John 4:34) – even if His physical hunger is not satiated. Our Lord understands, as the church father Jerome said, that “if anyone does not feed upon God’s Word, that one will not live” (Commentary on Matthew,1.4.4).
Coram deo: Living before the face of God
Matthew Henry comments, “Lack and poverty are a great temptation to discontent and unbelief, and the use of unlawful means for our relief, under the pretence that necessity has no law.” Despite His hunger pains, our Lord chose the food of His Father and embraced His mission of suffering. Let us follow Him and not let a potential loss of money or fame prevent us from embracing the mission of service He has given to us.
No. There are difficulties in conveying the idea of the original language into English. As a result, some readers may feel that this passage indicates God doesn’t recognize our struggle with sin. They think that one sin causes them to lose their place in heaven.
In reality God sees our struggle all too well. He does not expect new Christians to mature and bear fruit over night. But John emphasizes an increasing conformity of a person’s will to the will of God. If, however, a person shows no sign of change, and in fact his life is characterized by sin, John says that the person has not been born of God. Also see verse 6. The word “continue” is the key to this answer.
1WHAT LEADS to strife (discord and feuds) and how do conflicts (quarrels and fightings) originate among you? Do they not arise from your sensual desires that are ever warring in your bodily members?
2You are jealous and covet [what others have] and your desires go unfulfilled; [so] you become murderers. [To hate is to murder as far as your hearts are concerned.] You burn with envy and anger and are not able to obtain [the gratification, the contentment, and the happiness that you seek], so you fight and war. You do not have, because you do not ask. [I John 3:15.]
3[Or] you do ask [God for them] and yet fail to receive, because you ask with wrong purpose and evil, selfish motives. Your intention is [when you get what you desire] to spend it in sensual pleasures.
4You [are like] unfaithful wives [having illicit love affairs with the world and breaking your marriage vow to God]! Do you not know that being the world’s friend is being God’s enemy? So whoever chooses to be a friend of the world takes his stand as an enemy of God.
5Or do you suppose that the Scripture is speaking to no purpose that says, The Spirit Whom He has caused to dwell in us yearns over us and He yearns for the Spirit [to be welcome] with a jealous love?
6But He gives us more and more grace ([a]power of the Holy Spirit, to meet this evil tendency and all others fully). That is why He says, God sets Himself against the proud and haughty, but gives grace [continually] to the lowly (those who are humble enough to receive it).
7So be subject to God. Resist the devil [stand firm against him], and he will flee from you.
8Come close to God and He will come close to you. [Recognize that you are] sinners, get your soiled hands clean; [realize that you have been disloyal] wavering individuals with divided interests, and purify your hearts [of your spiritual adultery].
9[As you draw near to God] be deeply penitent and grieve, even weep [over your disloyalty]. Let your laughter be turned to grief and your mirth to dejection and heartfelt shame [for your sins].
10Humble yourselves [feeling very insignificant] in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you [He will lift you up and make your lives significant].
11[My] brethren, do not speak evil about or accuse one another. He that maligns a brother or judges his brother is maligning and criticizing the Law and judging the Law. But if you judge the Law, you are not a practicer of the Law but a censor and judge [of it].
12One only is the Lawgiver and Judge Who is able to save and to destroy [the One Who has the absolute power of life and death]. [But you] who are you that [you presume to] pass judgment on your neighbor?
13Come now, you who say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a city and spend a year there and carry on our business and make money.
14Yet you do not know [the least thing] about what may happen tomorrow. What is the nature of your life? You are [really] but a wisp of vapor (a puff of smoke, a mist) that is visible for a little while and then disappears [into thin air].
15You ought instead to say, If the Lord is willing, we shall live and we shall do this or that [thing].
16But as it is, you boast [falsely] in your presumption and your self-conceit. All such boasting is wrong.
17So any person who knows what is right to do but does not do it, to him it is sin. – Amplified Bible
Footnotes:
James 4:6 Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible with A Commentary.
“Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.” -1 Peter 2:12
In 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued the papal bull Ad exstirpanda authorizing the use of torture in the Roman Catholic Church’s effort to root out heresy. The slaughter of heretics was not particularly new. In 1211, for instance, more than 80 Waldensians were burned as heretics at Strasbourg because they preached according to their own understanding of the Scriptures, rejecting such Roman Catholic ideas as transubstantiation and purgatory.
Between 5,000 and 30,000 Hugenots (French Calivinist Protestants) were murdered starting on August 23, 1572, on the eve of the feast of the apostle Bartholomew. This St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre lasted several weeks and is remembered as one of the bloodier moments in the French Wars of Religion. Throughout the centuries, countless men, women, and children have been tortured and had their lands stolen, have been beaten and imprisoned and murdered in the name of Christ.
The vicious attack on those (real or perceived) heretics presents one of the darker images of European Christianity. It is a twisted portrait of the hunger for power, often accompanied by gluttony and excess and sexual license.
The problem cannot be relegated merely to the Roman Catholic Church of yesteryear. There is a sizeable list of Christian leaders, preachers, faith healers, evangelists, and everyday church members who have been publicly caught in one scandal or another in just the past century, bringing great shame to the name of Christ.
The Apostle Paul bluntly set forth the situation in Romans 2:22-24 when he said:
“Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege? Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you…”
When we read the commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain…” (Exo 20:7), we need to think beyond mere word usage. When we claim to follow Christ, we are in fact “taking his name” and we need to make sure that what we do and what we say and how we live our lives accurately represents him. We are no longer our own, we are bought with a price (1 Cor 6:20; 7:23). When we take his name, we need to truly mean it with all our hearts.
We have no higher calling than to be the personal representatives of the Lord Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Savior of the world. Yet, therein lies a peculiar jeopardy. We are all human, and we all make mistakes and do foolish things and fall. We all, therefore, have the ability to make God look bad.
Even the great men in the Bible failed. Moses struck the rock when he was supposed to speak to itm, and he was not permitted to bring Israel into the Promised Land (Num 20:8-12). David was called a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). Yet, when David sinned with Bathsheba, giving – as Nathan the prophet said -”great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme,” it resulted in long-lasting serious consequences for David’s whole house (2 Sam 12:14). David repented, and the LORD forgave him (2 Sam 12:13), but that’s not the issue. God takes His name very seriously, and we too easily tread it down in the mud.
Jars Of Clay: The answer to the problem is not to grit our teeth and determine we aren’t going to ever sin again. Not only will that attitude make us miserable, but it will make everybody around us miserable too. The answer is to love God and walk with Him every day. Enjoy Him. Love on Him. Rejoice in His goodness and His long patience with us. Thank Him for all the kind things He does down to the smallest details in our lives. As Paul says in Galatians 5:16, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”
We truly are not the ones that make God look good. His glory is seen when His light shines through us:
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” – 2 Cor 4:6-7
Our righteousness comes from Him. Yet, because we love Him, we honor Him by obeying Him; we do what He asks us to do; we behave honestly and honorably; we love our enemies, and we give our employers excellent work; we treat our wives and husbands and children as God wants us to treat them. Rather than trying our best to “look” good to people, like the Pharisees did, we hold His hand and let His Spirit shine all over people through us. That’s how we can take His Name and represent Him well.
“Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour. But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints…For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light: (For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth;)” – Eph 5:1-3; 8-9
Contrary to atheistic boilerplate, Christianity is anything but a crutch for the weak minded and timid hearted. Christians have gone to great lengths over the centuries to show that, while reason is no substitute for faith, and while it can never occupy anything other than a subordinate position with respect to the latter, reason can indeed establish at least the probability of God’s existence. Some Christians have gone further than this to argue that God’s existence is rationally demonstrable — that is, that it can be established with certainty by reason alone.
St. Anselm, the eleventh century bishop of Canterbury, is famous for his “ontological proof” for God. Anselm tried to show that there was no way that God can’t exist. The idea of God, Anselm reasoned, is the idea of a being “than which none greater can be conceived.” When the atheist and the theist deny and affirm God’s existence respectively, it is this idea that they have in mind. But since it is better for a being to have existence than for it to lack it, and since God is, by definition, the best, the conclusion is inescapable: God necessarily exists. It is no more possible, logically, to affirm the idea of God while simultaneously denying His real existence than it is possible to affirm the definition of a “bachelor” while denying that a bachelor is an unmarried man.
The ontological proof has had its share of detractors, many of the earliest and most distinguished of which have been Anselm’s fellow Christians. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, among the greatest thinkers the world over and himself a proponent of arguments for God’s existence, rejected it on the grounds that it illicitly moved from “the order of ideas” to “the order of things.” Simply put, the idea of God is one thing; God Himself is something else altogether. “God exists” is not self-evidently true to us, and so while the denial of this proposition is false, it is not self-contradictory. Thus, Anselm is mistaken: just because one can conceive God, doesn’t mean that one speaks nonsense in simultaneously denying that God exists.
Aquinas sought to prove God’s existence the only way he thought it was possible to do so — by appealing to experience, not of God, but of the world. From what is seen, Aquinas supposed, we can infer that which can’t be seen. His famous “five ways” argument reasons from five fundamental features of our world — change or motion, causality, contingency, excellence or value, and harmony or order — to the existence of God. That is, only by way of appeal to God, Aquinas contends, can we explain these phenomena.
The one theme that connects the five ways is that of contingency. To put it another way, the five ways argument is, essentially, an argument from contingency. To say that something is contingent is simply to say that it depends upon something else. You and I are contingent, as is this computer on which I type, the chair on which I sit, and everything else of which our world consists. Aquinas’s position is that the phenomena that constitute our world point beyond themselves to a first cause or reason that is not itself contingent, a being that is necessary. A necessary being is a being that contains the reason for its existence “within itself,” so speak, a being the very nature of which is to exist. And this being, Aquinas declares, is what we call God.
Interestingly, although Aquinas and other Christians who advanced arguments from contingency accepted the Genesis creation account, they acknowledged the possibility that the world could have existed forever, as Plato, Aristotle, and the pagans believed. As Father Frederick Copleston, a twentieth century Roman Catholic priest and historian of philosophy, once memorably quipped, whether you have one piece of chocolate or 1,000 pieces of chocolate, chocolate is never going to yield anything other than chocolate. Similarly, whether we are dealing with one contingent thing in the universe or the totality of contingent beings that comprise the universe, that which is contingent is by definition contingent upon something that, ultimately, can’t depend upon anything else.
There are several other arguments for God’s existence that we simply haven’t the time to consider at present. Whether any of them succeed is debatable and, at any rate, beside the point. That Christians labored tirelessly to establish God’s existence upon rational grounds is a fact of which far too many of our contemporaries, Christian and otherwise, need to be reminded, if not taught. Yet there is something else to be gotten from this little history lesson.
What is remarkable is that in presenting them to their Christian brethren, the proponents of these arguments were under no illusions that they were “preaching to the choir.” If they were under any such illusions, they couldn’t sustain them for long. Not that anyone would know it from studying philosophy in any of our secular universities, but medieval Christians anticipated by hundreds of years the considerations against the arguments for God’s existence that David Hume — widely held up in philosophy textbooks as their critic par excellence — wouldn’t raise until the eighteenth century.
William of Ockam, for instance, like Hume much later, rejected the notion that there is a necessary connection between causes and effects: just because A occurs doesn’t mean that B must necessarily occur. Unlike Hume, however, it was Ockam’s interest in safeguarding God’s sovereignty that informed his conclusion that causality is best understood in terms, not of necessity, but of regularity. Creation consists of distinct things that happen to be arranged in the order in which God arranged them. But God could have arranged them otherwise. Thus, there is no necessary connection between them.
There is another reason, though, why Ockam and such medieval thinkers as Nicholas of Autrecourt and John of Mirecourt rejected necessary causality. It is precisely because each thing — each “substance” — that God creates is unique in being fundamentally irreducible to every other that the existence of one can never be inferred from the existence of the other. Yet what this means is that causal arguments for God’s existence of the sort that Aquinas and many others put forward can never be as strong as they had been thought to be.
Contemporary Christians are the inheritors of a rich intellectual tradition. In these weeks leading up to Easter Sunday, they would be well served to explore it.
The economy may be having one of its down-and-out years, but Americans seem to be more excited than ever about celebrating this Christmas season. Wal-Mart may not be packed at 8 AM, but people still walk around decked up in red and green. Folks are still bedazzling their neighborhoods with the lights on their houses and they’re even sticking antlers and big round red noses on their cars.
None of that has anything to do with Jesus. These things do demonstrate a certain tendency to not worry so much about presents and wrapping paper and to enjoy Christmas no matter what. Yet, in all the years of commercialization and tinsel-tossing, some people have faithfully kept Jesus as the focus of the season. In recent years, in fact, certain people have put their heart and creativity into returning the birth of Jesus to the center stage in fairly loud, obvious ways.
Ineke Hearing of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho has made the birth of Jesus the most obvious aspect of her home each Christmas. She doesn’t just have a manger scene on a table; she turns her entire living room into a journey to see the Christ child. She creates trees and little stone paths across the room. The Wise men start one one side, with a long journey to go before they find Jesus. The shepherds and their flocks on their mossy pastures are nearer to the little town of Bethlehem, where the newborn baby is looked over by Joseph and Mary. It’s a beautiful, creative display, and Ineke has put her heart into its production each year she’s made the display.
The Richardsons of Redwood City, California, have put on a living nativity scene for the past 18 years, and each year it’s grown bigger. In the beginning, they hunted around for sheep and donkeys and (help us all) camels for their life-sized, breathing nativity scene. These days they’re working to find a place for a water buffalo and zebra-donkey hybrid. The manger scene has expanded too. With a bit of help, they’ve put together the town of Bethlehem, complete with an inn marked with a Hebrew street address and a sign that says “hotel” in Hebrew.
Dad Richardson plays the head shepherd each year (because he has to keep the animals in line), and a series of newborn grandchildren have been in position to play the baby Jesus lately. The other family members play different positions, from centurions to pottery-makers to Bethlehem’s belly dancers, and each year various city officials take their places as wise men. This year’s wise men include county supervisor-elect Don Horsley, Undersheriff Carlos Bolanos, Redwood City Councilwoman Barbara Pierce and former councilwoman Diane Howard.
“When it first started it was more just a project to have fun, find animals and help somebody else. Each year, we’ve added to it,” Richardson said.
Crowds of people come to enjoy the annual three-day event, which has the purpose of transporting people back in time 2000 years, to that night in a crowded city when Joseph had a difficult time finding a place for Mary to give birth.
We can imagine that night. We can imagine Mary’s birth pangs, her having to stop every so often to lean on Joseph as she had a contraction. We can imagine her giving birth in not-so-sanitary cave where the animals were kept. Then, we can imagine the host of angels descending on dirty, unwashed shepherds to tell them the good news so that they could go find the child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
This year, the weak economy can be considered a true blessing. We don’t have to worry so much about wrapped gifts. It’s okay. We can focus on loving one another. We can focus with ever-new appreciation on the magnificent gift that God has given us through the birth of His Son. He didn’t send him to a castle or to a wealthy home. God sent Jesus to be born in poor, dirty circumstances, to simple people who loved Him. Jesus truly became Emmanuel – God With Us – who went through all the same struggles we do on this planet. Then, after a three-year ministry in which he healed and taught the heart of God, he died for our sins and rose again from the dead to make the way for us. What an astonishing, wonderful thing for God to do! It should blow all our minds.
Merry Christmas all! Thank you, Lord, for your amazing gift!
Christmas season is in its full bustle now, and millions of families around the world are busily moving furniture and pulling out boxes of decorations to beautify their living rooms with Christmas trees. However, there seems to be very little connection between decorated evergreens and the birth of Jesus Christ. Many Christians wonder whether they should continue the tradition of the Christmas tree, while others have no qualms and enjoy all the trappings of the Christmas season. We have provided below a series of histories and legends for the benefit of all who wonder about the historical significance of the Christmas tree and how it ties into Christian tradition.
Ancient Rome
During the ancient festival of Saturnalia, Romans decked trees with small trinkets and also decorated their homes and temples with ivy and holly and wreaths. Gifts of coins, fruit, dolls and candles were exchanged during this time, but the gift giving could get more extreme. A Greek writer Libanius wrote that, “The impulse to spend seizes everyone.”
St. Boniface
The Bible often railed against the ancient pagan practice of worshiping idols under trees (Hosea 4:13, Ezek 6:13) in the mountains. Around AD 1000, a man named Boniface served as a missionary to the Germanic peoples in Europe, teaching them about Christianity. According to legend, Boniface came upon a group of pagans still worshipping an oak tree, sacred to the god Thor. In his fury at their foolishness, the missionary chopped the tree down. When a young fir tree grew up in place of the oak, Boniface saw it as a sign of the Christian faith, with its triangular shape representing the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The converted German people began to revere the evergreen as God’s tree. By the 12th century in central Europe, the fir tree was being hung upside down, undecorated, during the feast of the Nativity to represent the triune God of Christianity.
The Paradise Tree
In medieval times, when few people could read, plays were often used to describe Biblical events. The Creation week and the fall of Adam and Eve were taught as a Paradise Play, performed on December 24th each year. However, since it was impractical to use real fruit trees to represent the trees in the Garden of Eden in winter, evergreens were decorated with fruit as a substitute. Paper flowers were also used to decorate the Tree of Knowledge, originally only red (representing knowledge) and white (representing innocence), but later of many colors.
Martin Luther
The first Christmas tree lights are credited to Martin Luther. One winter night while walking home through the forest, Luther grew fearful of the dark and of meeting a wild animal. When he looked through the trees, however, and saw the twinkling stars offering him light and direction, he was greatly comforted. When he got home, he tried to describe to his family the beauty of the stars through the trees, but found words could not do justice to the scene. He then brought in a fir tree, which he decorated with candles to portray the lovely stars, the light that God had provided.
The Visitor to Strasbourg
The first written record of a Christmas tree was found in the diary of a visitor to Strasbourg around 1605, at that time a city in Germany. He described how the people would set up fir trees in their parlors and decorate them with apples, gold foil, “wafers and golden sugar-twists and paper flowers of all colors.”
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
When Queen Victoria was 13, she wrote about the Christmas trees decorated with lights and sugar ornaments, a tradition which the German aristocracy had brought to the English royalty. Victoria later married the German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburn, who loved the German tradition of the Christmas tree. Victoria was very popular with the British people and had a great influence on styles and public opinion. When an illustration of Albert and Victoria with their children around a Christmas tree was published in The Illustrated London News in 1848, many British families were soon decorating trees in their homes at Christmas.
The traditions of the Christmas tree soon spread to other parts of Europe and to America and many other areas of the world. Many have combined the manger scene with the tree, while in some areas of the world, the manger scene is preferred by itself. Whichever traditions your family chooses to observe, do so in honor of God Almighty, who gave His Son to the earth as a little baby, to one day die on another tree for the sins of all mankind.
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