Christmas Hope

 

A Christmas Prayer for Hope Christmas offers us a hope we can find nowhere else. A goal built into our souls by our Creator is to live in intimate personal relationship with God; "our hearts are restless until they rest in him," as St. Augustine noted. However, we fallen humans have no agency by which to forgive our sins, no pathway to escape hell and spend eternity in heaven. We could not go to God, so God came to us. Now our soul's deepest goal can be realized each and every day. We have the agency to go to the Christ of Christmas in repentance for our sins and commune with him in his word and worship. When we do, he makes the pathway by which we experience his hope in our hearts and share his hope with our hopeless world. Charles Wesley authored a Christmas prayer I invite you to pray every day of this blessed season: O Thou who camest from above, the pure celestial fire to impart kindle a flame of sacred love upon the mean altar of my heart.  There let it for thy glory burn with inextinguishable blaze,  and trembling to its source return, in humble prayer and fervent praise.  Jesus, confirm my heart's desire to work and speak and think for thee; still let me guard the holy fire, and still stir up thy gift in me.  Ready for all thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat, till death thy endless mercies seal, and make my sacrifice complete.