The most common tradition surrounding Christmas is that of gift-giving. We love giving gifts. In fact, gift-giving is often an expression of our love for another.
Gifts are to be given freely with no strings attached. Giving gifts with an expectation of a return gift is considered by our society to be quite
But back in Jesus’ time, gift-giving was only done for a return favor, kind of like the Godfather. Wealthy benefactors would take on clients and do them favors in exchange for favors from the client when the time came. Give a person a gift freely without expecting a return favor?
We as humans have a problem. It’s called
And Death is only here because Adam was all like
And once Sin entered the world, it’s been all like
And we’ve been saying to Sin all this time
And because Sin is in charge, he is free to use its great weapon against us.
This predicament has us saying
And we can’t climb out of it. So what do we do? We go to God and say
And God’s all like
God sends Jesus into the world in order to do everything Adam did, except
Jesus undid everything Adam did so now instead of getting Adam’s sin, we can get Jesus’s righteousness.
Actually, it’s more like
Because God, unlike patrons in old Roman times, is giving it to us
All we have to do is say