Life Begins As A Love Story - The Greatest Gift

Life Begins as a Love Story

So God created human beings in his own image.

Genesis 1:27

Today's Reading

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” . . .

God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

So God created human beings in his own image.

In the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:1-5, 26-27

This Christmas story—it begins in the beginning, this love story that’s been coming for you since the beginning.

It begins with the always coming of Christ.

Christ, who is there in the beginning, the voice calling out of darkness, an echo in cosmic emptiness, speaks it by the commanding word of His mouth: Let there be . . .

Let there be light and land and living beasts. . . .

But you? You alone were formed by a huddle of hearts:

Let us make human beings.

The authority of God made all of creation. But it was the affection of God that made all His children.

The three persons of the Trinity—Father God, Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit—gathered close together to imagine you. And God in three persons, uncontainable affection, knelt down and kissed warm life into you with the breath of His love.

You are made of the dust of this earth, and you are made of the happiness of heaven, and you are flesh and you are spirit, and you are of two worlds longing for the home of forever and Him.

No matter your story before, this is your beginning now: you were formed by Love . . . for love.

John Calvin, he wrote it like a reviving breath—that every human being is “formed to be a spectator of the created world and given eyes that he might be led to its author . . . first [to] cast our eyes upon the very beautiful fabric of the world in which [God] wishes to be seen by us. . . . As soon as we acknowledge God to be the supreme architect, who has erected the beauteous fabric of the universe, our minds must necessarily be ravished with wonder at His infinite goodness, wisdom and power.”a

Ravished with wonder.

That the earth outside your window is tilted right now at just twenty-three degrees. So there are seasons and the vapors of oceans don’t simply amass continents of ice, so the planet’s bulk of six sextillion tons (that’s twenty-one zeros) spins perfectly balanced on an invisible axis, spinning you around at one thousand miles an hour, nine million miles a year. Hurtling you through space even right now in this sun orbit at nineteen miles per second, 600 million miles a year. You, held in this moment by this unseen belt of gravity and turning these pages slowly while the miracle happens all around you: “He . . . poised the earth on nothingness” (Job 26:7, NJB).

Ravished with wonder.

Ravished by an even larger, bigger, more infinite Love.

So go to the window. Go to the hills, the desert, the corner, the back door, and be ravished and taken and awed, and you who were made by Love, made for love—be still and know and watch love come down.

The answer to deep anxiety is the deep adoration of God.

And the greatest gift we can give our great God is to let His love make us glad.

Christmas begins here. The Christmas story, this love story—the whole blue marble of the world spinning right now on the Cross-beam axis of Love.

Unwrapping More of His Love in the World

What could you create today with a gentle heart of love (a letter, a treat, a surprise)? Create something out of your love!

We must be sure of the infinite good that is done to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, in order that we may be ravished in love with our God and inflamed with a right affection to obey Him, and keep ourselves strictly in awe of Him.

JOHN CALVIN

A Moment for Reflection

What in this whole blue marble of God’s world causes you to pause in wonder?

What does it mean to you that you were made out of the overflow of God’s love?

Think of three people who are not easy to love. What would it look like to love those people with God’s love?

a John Calvin, quoted in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 103.

From the Book:

The Greatest Gift cover image


The Greatest Gift
By Ann Voskamp
Tyndale
$7.99

Read Now