PREMEDITATED LOVE

The word “premeditated” is almost always used in relation to murder.  Its use is not restricted though. The whole event of Christmas may be viewed as divinely premeditated.  While murder is the taking of life, Christmas is God's gift of everlasting life (John 6:40).  The irony is that man’s premeditated act of Christ’s murder made possible God’s premeditated gift of our salvation.  It was a reality that God envisioned and intended from the very beginning.  "For God so loved the world . . ."

 Christmas is far from a celebration of divine impulse.  Our Father did not make a spur of the moment decision to send Jesus his Son to earth for our salvation.  We see this in God’s premeditated plan for John The Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, to go before Jesus with the message of repentance and the good news of the Messiah’s coming.  Well before that, seven hundred years before, He told the prophet Isaiah about his plans (Isaiah 40:3 & 53).  God’s deep love for us has always been premeditated.  He planned our salvation from the very beginning. 

Over the millennia, our Father God has been faithful.  Now his prevenient grace calls us to respond.  How are we to respond to such lavish love?  We respond in his likeness as a people of intentional, premeditated love in celebration.  In his likeness, filled to the measure of the fullness of God, we arise each morning meditating on and remembering how long, wide, high, and deep is the love of God.  Then we go forward faithfully into his day with anticipatory thanks and praise as celebratory expressions of our love for Him and for all others.   We are a people of hope grounded in the optimism of God’s grace.  Hope anticipates. Hope expects.  Regardless of the circumstances, hope believes that God loves us and is faithful. 

Christmas focuses light on God’s premeditated love.  It calls us to celebrate his never failing love seen in His great gift of His Son and the continuing gift of the Holy Spirit.  Thanks be to God for his premeditated love!