December 25: Jesus

Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.  - Luke 2:11

When Christine and I were dating we decided one time to make popovers. I’d mentioned my love for them and she responded with a blank look. I was determined to make some for her. I was visiting her at college and we scrounged up the necessary utensils and ingredients and enjoyed our time together in the kitchen.

But when the time came to remove the popovers from the oven it was a disaster. Somehow I’d ended up with a dozen little pucks so inedible that not even the birds had any interest in them.

I could blame it on the use of a dorm kitchen and dorm tools. I was certainly a very inexperienced cook. Maybe the ingredients had been subpar.

I kept going over the recipe I’d been given, making sure that I’d used all the right ingredients in the right proportions.
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I’ve been cooking long enough now that I think I know what happened. I think that the person who wrote down the recipe for me had thought about some step or other that it went without saying, forgetting that the recipe was being written down for me. “Surely I don’t need to tell Joel,” the thinking went, “to unwrap the stick of butter before adding it to the batter.”

That’s what happens when we’ve been doing something for a long time: things become old hat to us and they go from being something we delighted to say to be something that might go without saying.

Let me say it: you will never have a Christmas worth having if Jesus is not the first ingredient. If you get everyone the perfect gift, on time and under budget, but Jesus is not the first ingredient, it’s all for naught. If it snows on the way home from the Christmas Eve service and all the next day while you sip hot chocolate in your pajamas, but Jesus is not the first ingredient, it amounts to nothing.

Praise him today. Talk about him and talk to him, all day long. Make it all about Jesus or you’ll spend the next few days looking over your recipe, scratching your head, and wondering what you did wrong.

Here is a Popover recipe to try (hopefully successfully).

Merry Christmas!

Written by: Joel Tate

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