Fullness Of Time
It is finally here! It’s Christmas! The most wonderful time of the year. A day for making merry, for celebrating with family and friends. All the countdowns clocks have stopped and will rest, at least for these 24 hours.
The way we look forward to Christmas makes think that that’s an awful lot of pressure to put on one day. We spend weeks preparing, cleaning, decorating, shopping, baking, wrapping. All for this one singular day. And then, all too quickly, it’s over for another year. The presents have all been opened, the cookies and candies picked over. The decorations suddenly become one more chore to put off, at least until the new year.
But I enjoy the end of Christmas day. Not that I’m happy to see it go, I wish this one day could last and last. But once it is almost over I enjoy it even still. I wait for everyone else to go to bed and then I get a cup of something hot and sit in the glow of the tree, the last strains of Christmas music playing softly in the distance. And I wonder what Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus were doing at the end of that first Christmas. I wonder what was happening in Heaven, now that Jesus had finally been delivered. Had there been a huge countdown clock in Heaven that now read: 00:00:00?
Paul tells us that the first Christmas represented the “fullness of time.”
Galatians 4:4 – 7
4. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, 5. so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. 6. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7. Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. (NASB)
So Merry Christmas. Enjoy this day and embrace what it means for all of us.
