What are you getting from Christmas? (4 of 5)

Have you ever experienced total darkness?  One kind of darkness is the absence of light.  Once I turned the lights out in the fellowship hall of my church, and walked across the room in total darkness when I squarely hit the post which held up the building.  Guess who won?  For a moment, I thought I had been killed - then the pain hit, my knees buckled, and I came to moments later.

The other kind of darkness has nothing to do with light, it is when you see something for the first time which has always been there. It happened to me just the other - I was driving down a road I have driven down hundreds of times, and there it was, a house I had never seen before.  

No matter which kind of darkness you have experienced, light is the answer.  Along with freedom from sin, bondage and exile, Jesus birth reminds us of the freedom from darkness.  He is the light of the world.

Learning lessons we already know is a startling as hitting a pole in the middle of a room, or seeing a house for the very first after years of travelling down the some old road.  A new vision, insight, or direction is from God through Jesus.  There are two ways to access this gift: 1) turn the light on or 2) open your eyes.

The hymn says it this way: "Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderfull face, and the things of earth will grow strangley did in the light of his glory and grace.