We’re just two weeks from Christmas. Presents are still being purchased, wrapped, and shipped. Christmas cards still need to be signed and mailed. Loose ends on travel details are getting sorted. Family event-planning is getting finalized. Perhaps you’re multitasking right now and gift-wrapping while you listen. We all feel the holiday pressures, of course, Pastor John, as we gear up for one of the busiest holidays in the world — and one of the most expensive. The average American adult will drop about $1,000 just on gifts during this season, leading to a question of great relevance this month, like in this email from a podcast listener named James.

“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for the podcast. Often, I hear that we are to love God for who he is, not for what he does for us — to love the Giver more than the gifts. How can we know that we are doing this, especially during this Christmas season? When I examine my own heart, so much of what I know about God seems to be in relation to what he has done for me, like the sending of his Son in the incarnation. How do I interact with him on the basis of him, and not simply on the basis of the gifts he has given me?”

First, I think it is absolutely crucial in pursuing that interaction with God in that way to get really clear in our mind and in our heart that there is a huge and important difference between enjoying a person who gives gifts and enjoying the gifts instead of the person or more than the person. And I think we need to clarify this and get it fixed in our minds, both from experience and from Scripture. Let me give you an example of what I mean from experience.

Key 1: Loving the Giver of the Gift

What if you give an engagement ring? You’ve been in love for two years, maybe, and now you’re going to move this thing decisively forward. You give a ring. (I’m assuming you’re a man, but gals, you apply it in an appropriate way.) You give your fiancée a beautiful diamond ring, and she spends the rest of the night and then the following weeks bragging about this gift, taking it and showing it to everybody. She never calls you. She never looks at you. She never takes you by the hand and looks you in the eye. She’s just thrilled with this diamond, and your intent in giving her that was totally missed.

“The goal of all God does for us is to make it possible for us to be with him and him to be with us.”

How would you feel about that? You wanted her to look at it. Oh, yes, you wanted her to love it. You wanted her to be thankful for it. You wanted her to enjoy it. And then you wanted her to put it on her hand, take your hands across the table, look you in the eye, and say, “I would love to spend the rest of my life with you. You are ten thousand times more precious to me than this beautiful ring.” We understand from our own experience what it means when gifts are loved more than the giver. We get that. There’s no excuse for not getting that. We get it in our experience.

Then we get it from the Bible when it comes to God, because it’s all over the place:

• 1 Peter 3:18: “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” That’s why he died: to “bring us to God.”
• Or Romans 5:11 — after saying that “we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2) and “we rejoice in [tribulation]” (Romans 5:3), then Paul adds this in Romans 5:11: “More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
• Or Psalm 16:11: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
• Or Psalm 73:25–26: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
• Or consider the story of the ten lepers healed by Jesus in Luke 17:11–37. Remember? All ten — no leprosy, awesome, healed, run away. One of them, a Samaritan, comes back praising God and falling down at Jesus’s feet. What’s the point? The point is that they missed it. They just missed it. This is about Jesus. This is about God. Leprosy deliverance was a means to that end.

So, we know from experience, we know from the Scriptures, that there’s a difference between enjoying a giver through his gifts and enjoying gifts instead of the giver. We know that. We get that. We know that the goal of all God does for us is designed to make it possible for us to be with him and him to be with us. He does everything for us to be with us as our all-satisfying treasure and Father and friend and Savior. Getting that clear is the key, I think, to experiencing God in and through all his gifts.

Key 2: Remembering the Gift of Jesus

Here’s one more key to help us experience God this way during the Christmas season. We should realize that every gift, every good thing that comes into our lives of any kind as a token of God’s everlasting kindness — all of it, all of it was bought by the sacrifice of Jesus, the blood of Jesus. Here’s the logic of Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” So, “all things” are coming to us as believers because he didn’t spare his Son. Here’s the effect this has: All giving and getting, especially at Christmastime, becomes a reminder of the death of Jesus.

Now, what effect does that have? What effect does God intend for his Son’s death to have on us when we think this way? On the one hand, Christ is the Father’s indescribable gift (Romans 8:32; 2 Corinthians 9:15). And Christ is his own gift. Over and over, the New Testament says Christ gave himself, Christ gave himself, Christ gave himself (Mark 10:45; Galatians 1:4; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 5:2, 25; 1 Timothy 2:6; Titus 2:14).

Think of it! If God gives his Son, and the Son gives himself for you and to you, it doesn’t even make sense to say we love the gift more than the Giver. The gift is the Giver. The Giver is the gift. So, since every gift shared at Christmastime is possible only because of the death of Christ for us, and thus directs our attention to the death of Christ, therefore every gift takes us through the cross to the gift who is the Giver.

“All giving and getting, especially at Christmastime, becomes a reminder of the death of Jesus.”

Here’s the other way of seeing it. In Romans 5:8, Paul says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So, behind every gift that we get or give at Christmastime is the death of Christ. And that means that every gift is the overflow of the gift of God’s love, because that’s what he shows when Christ dies. When you think of God’s love, it is inseparable from himself. When John Piper talks about enjoying God, I don’t mean, “Oh, but you can’t enjoy his love.” In a sense, his love is not a gift. It is what he is. When real love binds two persons together, they don’t say, “Hey, where’s the gift?” They say, “You are the gift. You are the gift. You are my love. Your love is yourself given to me.”

So, it seems to me that Romans 8:32 is the key to Christmas God-centeredness in giving and getting gifts. Every good in our life as Christians is owing to the death of Jesus, according to the logic of Romans 8:32, and that death is the gift of God himself for our everlasting joy and the gift of God’s love, which is also the giving of himself to us.