Read Online The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas by Ann Voskamp - Free Book Online Page B

the Jesse Tree as your gift to Jesus of a contrite heart, and pray that Jesus would help you give up this sin.

    [Advent] is a time of quiet anticipation. If Christ is going to come again into our hearts, there must be repentance. Without repentance, our hearts will be so full of worldly things that there will be “no room in the inn” for Christ to be born again. . . . We have the joy not of celebration, which is the joy of Christmas, but the joy of anticipation.
    JOHN R. BROKHOFF

    When have you found yourself running from God? How did He draw you back to Himself?
    In what ways have you seen God calm the storms in your life?
    Thank God that He invites you to turn around, to be resurrected.

You, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, are only a small village.
    MICAH 5:2

         You, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,
              are only a small village among all the people of Judah.
         Yet a ruler of Israel,
              whose origins are from the distant past,
              will come from you on my behalf.
         The people of Israel will be abandoned to their enemies
              until the woman in labor gives birth.
         Then at last his fellow countrymen
              will return from exile to their own land.
         And he will stand to lead his flock with the LORD’s strength,
              in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.
         Then his people will live there undisturbed,
              for he will be highly honored around the world.
              And he will be the source of peace.
    MICAH 5:2-5
    O little town of Bethlehem Ephrathah and Scappoose, Oregon, and Wallagrass, Maine, and Americus, Kansas, and the quiet side streets and living rooms of a million small and unlikely places —Kingdom comes to places like you.
    You, there, with your lights strung up and down like sequins that have seen better days. With your ragamuffin kids and paint-chipped Christmas ornaments from 1982, your scarlet poinsettias in the front window, in the fading light of the front room.
    There’s a winter wonderland set up on someone’s mantel. They’ll get carolers to come round to the nursing home this Friday night and sing, “Hark! the herald angels sing / Glory to the newborn King.” Everyone will smile worn and grateful, and no one will care if it’s off key.
    Because there is a king in Bethlehem. In backwater Bethlehem, an unmarried hardly-woman in labor giving birth to your King, and He will be your newborn and ancient and coming and future King, newly birthed, whose goings-forth have been from of old, from ancient days. A King like and infinitely greater than King Arthur, with his tomb inscription: “Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus”  —“Here lies Arthur, king once, and king to be.” Forsake the fairy tales for the story that is history: this Bethlehem King is the true and the real once and still coming King —the King of humanity’s memory. The King from the beginning, back when we were young and the world was Edenic and the wonderland was us.
    There’s your winter wonderland set up on the cosmic stage: the Son is sent in through the fallen kingdom’s back door, the King is born into a barn to wrest the forces from the pit, slay the demons, crush the head of the evil one, and woo the world back to life. The war is bloody. It is heinously dark. And on Calvary, evil corners the Son. Iron spikes the King to a Tree and laughs haunting triumph —only to have light shatter the dark and the King fling off the rotting grave clothes and rise.
    Author J. R. R. Tolkien called this moment when the light of deliverance throws back the darkness the “eucatastrophe” —the moment when evil is dashed and righteousness suddenly, spectacularly rises.
    “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history,” writes Tolkien. The birth of the King is the light in your story, in history, that slashes back the smothering