Holidays Jewels from the Word

Friends, as a belated Christmas gift, I want to post a file which you can download named Holidays Jewels From the Word which contains 30 of the Christmas devotionals I have written over the years.

I know many of you have read my devotionals over the years so these might be familiar to you.

I hope you enjoy them. Click here to download the pdf file


Jewels from the Word

Turn Your Radio On

I used to sing an old gospel song named ‘Turn Your Radio On,’ written by Albert Brumley in 1938.

Turn your radio on and listen to the music in the air
Turn your radio on, heaven’s glories share
Turn your lights down low, and listen to the Master’s radio
Get in touch with God, turn your radio on.

The song was written at a time when radios were new to general public, especially those in rural areas. Radio broadcasts were played by stations with call letters and numbers on a dial and to pick up the broadcast you had to have your radio turned on and tuned in to the number on the dial.

I remember particularly Chicago station WLS which was 890 on the dial which I listened to late at night on a little battery-operated transistor radio. It could only be picked up in our area late at night after all the closer stations had quit broadcasting. They played the latest and greatest songs. In the 60s when I was a teen, they had a late-night music broadcast with the Top 40s, playing all the 60s hits, like the Beatles’ songs.

We could tune in to WLS all day long, but would usually only get a few sounds, maybe a little bit of a song, but by 10 p.m. it was mostly loud and clear. Of course the quality of our radio limited the quality of our reception and there was interference of every kind in the air—bad weather, other stations broadcasting, brick walls.

Father God is broadcasting loud and clear all the time. He never stops sending out the signal to us, but we can’t hear or understand his program content because of interference.

God is saying, “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.” Jeremiah 29:13 NKJV.

Seeking God’s will is hard work. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easy, because it’s not. You have to search for Him with all your heart.
Lavon Hightower Lewis

Coming Up Bull Creek

The home where I grew up was across the alley from the creek. Bull Creek was a very shallow, lazy creek. Never one time in my life did I see a boat on Bull Creek. Even if someone had tried to float a boat on the creek, they wouldn’t have been able to float under the low bridge on Tahlequah Street.

That’s what made the saying so strange, “When our ship comes in…..”

I often wondered when I was a child what it really meant when someone said, “When our ship comes in…” Oh, I knew it meant that they expected the ship to bring their fortune, to bring them money, but how or why, I didn’t know.

Then in history classes I learned about the early settlers of America and how they depended on ships from England to bring them supplies. I figured it out, that’s what it meant when they said, “when our ship comes in.” The early-day settlers had to carefully watch what they used and use things from nature in their new home in America to “make-do” until the next ship came from England with supplies from home.

Mama would even make a joke about it, “Our ship couldn’t make it up Bull Creek.” The absurdity of that idea of an ocean vessel trying to come up Bull Creek would make us all laugh.

Mama taught us to work hard. We all had to work in the garden which was the biggest one on the block, and yielded the best green beans, corn, tomatoes, beets, all canned in Mason jars to feed us kids during the winter.

She taught us to give to the church, to give to others who were in need, and help out our neighbors and friends when they needed a hand. Mama also taught us to believe in God to supply our needs and not some make-believe “ship coming in.”

King David said, “I have been young, and now am old; Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his descendants begging bread.” Psalm 37:25 NKJV.

Lights of the Christmas Tree

In the years when we were teenagers, Mama bought a silver aluminum Christmas tree, and we decorated it with all our old decorations she had accumulated over those early years. Our favorite lights were the old-fashioned bubble lights that looked like oil pumping up inside, made to look like a candle.
We had a couple of little plastic reindeer which looked like a rocking horse. I still have one of those plastic reindeer, pink and fragile, probably 60 years old. There was also a little Santa Claus and maybe an angel made out of the same plastic material. We had a beautiful angel to top the tree but I don’t remember much about what it looked like.
I still have a few of those items myself, and have picked up a few over the years. Sorry to say, many of those items have totally fallen to pieces, because items made in the 1940s and 50s were made of a low-quality plastic and were not made to last 75 years.
We loved the silver icicles or tinsel that we threw over the tree branches, and as recently as two years ago, I bought some like them to decorate my artificial tree. I read that the early icicles were made out of lead but the new ones available today are some kind of plastic with a metallic coating.
What does any of this have to do with Christmas? Many Christians have turned away from decorating a tree for Christmas since it was obviously not part of the early-day Christian church’s holiday observations. There are many traditions that have sentimental value to many Christians and I’m one of those sentimental types. My personal opinion is that what the Bible speaks about, I teach. When the Bible is silent, I remain silent.
Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12 NIV
 
All my memories of Christmases past revolve around the story of Jesus’ birth. He is the Light of the world and that’s what I remember when I see the lights of the Christmas tree.