VISIONS OF SUGAR PLUMS

"While visions of sugar plums danced in their heads." That phrase is more than just a fragment of poetry from The Night Before Christmas - a familiar poem most of us have enjoyed since our childhood - and again in the years we read it to our own children - and, for some of us, even AGAIN as we read it to our grandchildren. Those few words hint at dreams we all hold, don't they?

Don't we all long for a Christmas vision? Don't we place our hope in the promise of Christmas? We are not alone!

ALL OF ISRAEL DID! The prophets foretold the coming of the Christ for centuries. There was a passionate longing in the hearts of all Israel for a Messianic kingdom overruling all the oppression under which they lived. This longing - this vision - this dream went far deeper than a sugar plum dream.

ALL OF HEAVEN DID! The angelic message to the shepherds indicated that God Himself - who commissioned the seraphs' song - rejoiced in the hope of earth's Savior. Mankind's long bondage to sin would at last be broken.

THE MAGI DID! You can be sure, such a team of scientists - for in their day that's what they were - was not about to set forth on a long, dangerous journey across the wide face of the known world without a hope for something extraordinary.

YOU AND I join this long train of hope, stretching back through the millennia, led by prophets and sages, magi and shepherds, and pulled along the tracks of eternity by heaven itself!

Today, the summons of the Spirit is to open your heart in wonder as a child

• to welcome the expectation of God's promise and power
• to transform what needs to be
• to forgive what failed to be
• to heal what yearns to be
• and to restore what cries out to be.

Packaged in the Person of Jesus is every gift we will ever need to fulfill every longing we may ever have. It will take a lifetime to unwrap the essentials for our present, and an eternity to unfold the glories for our future.

But start now. Receive the promise of Christmas: "Today ... to you ... a Savior!"

Start by letting your heart embrace promises for today and the New Year just ahead. Open God's Word and feast on the truths His eternal covenant opens up to you. The promises in the Bible deliver meaning and hope to our greatest desires and our deepest dilemmas. God's every word is a solid reality upon which tomorrow's hopes can be placed and secured.

So let the visions dance in the eyes of your heart. Let faith see what your physical eyes cannot. Christmas dreams that are rooted deep in God's own Word can never be disappointed.

"And you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one thing has failed of all the good things which the Lord your God spoke concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one word of them has failed." Joshua 23:14

[thoughts from Jack Hayford, Come ... and Behold Him!]