Free The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas by Ann Voskamp Page A

barrel.
    So much for chestnuts roasting on the open fire.
    This is about the open fire warming the tips of your numbed fingers, distracting you from the cold icing down the nape of your neck.
    How does Advent come and kindle in the guy living out of a cardboard box behind the busy mall in mid-December? In the woman slapped around in the flat over the bar serving up office Christmas parties? In the pregnant runaway down at the bus station who’s watching everybody head home and doesn’t know where the next meal will come from, the next kind word, the next clean bed?
    Mordecai —he was in sackcloth outside the palace gate.
    He sent word to his niece, chosen queen of the king, to never forget the plight of those collected on the other side of the gate: “Don’t think for a moment that because you’re in the palace you will escape when all other Jews are killed. If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance and relief for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die.”
    It comes like a whisper from those outside the gate: You’ve got to use the life you’ve been given to give others life.
    You’ve got gifts that weren’t given to line your life with; they were given to be a lifeline to others —or you lose your life.
    It comes like an echo from God: if your gifts don’t give relief, you don’t get real life.
    What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?
    It comes as a message for Advent, the Mordecai message for such a time as now: you’ve got to use your position inside the gate for those outside the gate —or you’re in the position of losing everything.
    If you have any food in your fridge, any clothes in your closet, any small roof, rented or owned, over your head, you are richer than 75 percent of the world. We are the ones living inside the gate.
    If you have anything saved in the bank, any bills in your wallet, any spare change in a jar, you are one of the top 8 percent wealthiest people in the world. We are the ones living inside the gate.
    If you can read these words right now, you have a gift three billion people right now don’t. If your stomach isn’t twisted in hunger pangs, you have a gift that one billionpeople right now don’t. If you know Christ as the greatest Gift, you have a gift that untold millions of people right now don’t. We are the ones living inside the gate.
    Esther hears the Mordecai message, and it does something to her soul. You’ve got to use your position inside the gate for those outside the gate —or you’re in the position of losing everything.
    Esther puts herself in the place of those outside the gate and makes herself the bridge to the King. And the woman given gifts for such a time as this —she risks her position for the people. If I perish, I perish.
    There’s a boy right now splayed in the slum and sewage of Calcutta. A child crying weak for food in Uganda, this haunting plea like the cry of the last raven. And there’s One whose home was the original palace, One who is the apex of beauty, One who put Himself in the place of you outside the gate, you in the muck and the mire and the stench of sin. There is One who came to a barn and made Himself a bridge back to the King by laying down His back on the bark of that Tree. He looked at you desperate on the outside of the gate, and His love was instant. He didn’t ponder, If I perish, I perish. He promised, “So I perish, I perish.”
    This is the love story that has been coming for you since the beginning. That Babe in the manger —He is the Princeon the Cross who saves you with His life, so your identity is no longer wrapped up in being one of the rich ones inside the gate. Your identity is wrapped up in being one of the rich ones inside of Him .
    When you unwrap your worth in the Gift of Christ, you release your grip on all the other gifts. You are loved and carried and secure, and what else do you need when you have Him? You are free,