Psalm 16:11- You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Come with me to the place where you are a child again at Christmas time.  You are counting down to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  You stuff your face with ice-cream and fruit cake at every opportunity possible. You jump up and down with excitement.  One thing keeps the excitement burning: what presents will you get on Christmas Day? You visualize your most desired wish and see yourself unwrapping it.  AH!!! The absolute joy on your face that your parents got you exactly what you wanted. Christmas Day comes and it is not quite what you expected or it is.   But after a few hours, days, weeks, months the joy of those presents wears off.

This Christmas God wants us to shift our focus to HIM, to unwrapping Him.  This is a gift that will take forever to unwrap for it is the path of life. The old chorus says “In the presence of the Lord there is fullness of joy”.  Don’t we need joy every day?  Experiencing God’s joy everyday would keep us going and going and going.  This means we have to abide in the presence of God.  We must stay connected to God as our source or nothing else will make sense. 

How do we unwrap the presence of God? First daily we must accept and confess that we need Jesus as no other present or presence can fill that inner void that we all have been created with.  Secondly we need to repent of our secondly, minutely, hourly, daily sins which seek to hinder us from moving ahead with God.  Thirdly we need to believe on Jesus so that we can be saved from ourselves and everything else daily. Once we do this seek to each day unwrap God through interactions with His : WORD (Jesus), written word (the Bible), the spoken word (sermons, Bible studies, songs, hymns, spiritual songs, conversations with others), prayers and intimate conversations with God, visions, dreams, God’s creation and anyway that the Lord seeks to manifest Himself. The more you desire to know and unwrap the presence of God the more you realize that you don’t know and there is so much more that God wants to teach and show us.

As today as you unwrap your presents, take some time to unwrap the presence of God, I guarantee you will never be the same again.

PRAYER

Lord I often get so caught up in the unwrapping of presents that I don’t take the time to unwrap you and experience the joy and eternal pleasures at your right hand.  Forgive me and help me to start knowing you even as I am fully known by you.  In the name of Jesus who unwrapped Himself so that we could cross the great divide.  Amen