God’s love was revealed among us in a way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this love, not what we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. – 1st John 4:9-10

PRAYER Dear Lord Jesus…your Father’s love was so unlimited that he wanted us to know that love and to find in it the fulfillment of our deepest desires. So he sent us you, with a human heart big enough to hold all human loneliness and all human anguish. Your heart is not a heart of stone, but a heart of flesh; your heart of flesh is not narrowed by human sin and unfaithfulness, but is as wide and deep as divine love itself. 

Scripture tells us, “God is love” (1 John 4:16). The God who is love was revealed among us when he sent his Son into the world. The world in which God revealed himself was not a kind and receptive place. It was, and is, a world lost in sin and rebellion against its Creator. But that is the world God loved, and that is the world – our world – into which he sent his Son. In Jesus, the holy Child of Bethlehem, the God who is love was revealed among us as one of us. The loving heart of Jesus was, and is, the loving heart of God himself, the loving heart of God in human flesh. Finally, his soul sorrowful and his heart weighed down by human guilt and shame. Jesus carried our sins in his own body to the cross. There on that cross, the loving heart of God was revealed for the world to see. .