The Wonder of Christmas [Large Print]: Once You Believe, Anything Is Possible
By Ed Robb and Rob Renfroe
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About this ebook
This year, rediscover the true wonder of Christmas by sharing the love of Christ with others. Each chapter centers on one element of the Christmas story, looking to the Christmas story and the stories of real people today to offer inspiration and ideas for reflecting the light of Jesus at Christmas and throughout the year.
Chapters Include:
The Wonder of a Name
The Wonder of a Star
The Wonder of a Manger
The Wonder of a Promise
The Wonder of Christmas is also perfect for an all-church study and includes resources for all ages, teaching video, worship ideas and visuals, and preaching guides, all areas of church life weave together for a wonder-filled Advent celebration. The adult study book is the centerpiece of the program, serving as the adult small group resource and the source of content for worship planners and leaders.
Ed Robb
Dr. Ed Robb is Senior Pastor at The Woodlands UMC in Houston, Texas. Serving the church for more than forty years, his vision and leadership have led the church to become one of the fastest growing churches in Methodism, with over 14,000 members. He is the author of The Wonder of Christmas, Under Wraps, and Mountaintop Moments. He and his wife, Beverly, have three adult children.
Read more from Ed Robb
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The Wonder of Christmas [Large Print] - Ed Robb
1.
The Wonder of a Star
ROB RENFROE
Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.
Matthew 2:2 NIV
My wife, Peggy, has a habit that drives me crazy—and brings me lots of joy. Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, however late we might be, she’ll stop and take a picture—several pictures. Usually her unplanned photography is preceded by her stopping, bending over, and saying, Isn’t that amazing?
Often what has grabbed her attention is something I have already passed by without noticing. Even when she points it out, it seems rather mundane and ordinary to me. It’s just a rock on a path or a shell on the beach or some berries in a bush or some fungus on a decaying tree branch.
Here’s the strange thing. When we get home and she enlarges the picture and shows it to me, I see it—the interplay of different colors in a stone she spotted lying in a riverbed; the pattern of stripes on the wings of a bug she saw crawling on a blade of grass; the design of a flower’s petals as intricate and delicate as the stitching of a quilt; the brilliant hues of berries in a field, hiding their glory under a carpet of wild grass. When she shows these things to me, I can see the beauty that she saw, the magnificence of little things I had walked by and missed.
Peggy is an artist—she paints, creates, and imagines. Like every artist, she sees the world with a sense of curiosity and appreciation—actually, it is the gift of wonder. The gift of wonder is the ability to be amazed by little things—to see more when other people see less; to be surprised again by the beauty you’ve seen a hundred times, feeling about it the way you did the first time you saw it—and to wonder how life could give you such a marvelous gift.
As we explore the wonder of Christmas together in the coming weeks, you are invited to see the world—and what God has done—through the gift of wonder; to believe there is more to this world than the eye beholds; to look for the beauty in what God has done and allow yourself to be amazed by a story you’ve heard a hundred times; to come to this season with a spirit of curiosity, trusting that if you will slow down and open your heart, Creation’s Artist will astonish you with gifts that are waiting for you.
A passage from a sermon written by Frederick Buechner, The Face in the Sky,
is a good way to begin talking about the wonder of Christmas:
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too.¹
Buechner is saying that once you believe in Christmas, the world becomes a place of wonder—a place where God is waiting for us. Waiting to show us the beauty and the goodness of life. Waiting to show us something that will stop us in our tracks, speak to our hearts, and amaze us. Waiting to show us something that will lead us to God. But we must have eyes to