I was looking the other day in a Christian bookshop for a book on the subject of grace, and found one I really took to. The reason for my attraction to it was the first two lines on the back of the book:

There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.
There is nothing you can do to make God love you less.

The doctrine of grace is at the very heart of the Christian message. God has taken the initiative in our salvation, out of pure love for us, not because we have done anything to deserve it. Salvation is the gift He offers us, and by salvation is meant simply His kind of life. We can ignore this gift, or we can receive it with open arms and embrace it.

In the opening of each letter Paul wrote to his new converts around the Roman Empire he wishes them 'grace and peace' or (occasionally) 'grace, mercy, and peace'. And to the Ephesians he spelt out the doctrine of grace in very explicit terms: "But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast." (Eph. 2:4-9). No one can boast. No one can say 'because I did this, or this, or this, God has saved me.'

There is nothing you can do to make God love you more. This is the message we celebrate every Christmas, when we remember the greatest gift God had at His disposal: His own Son, born into the weakness of human flesh, the total dependency of a little child.

Let us expand the thought a little. There is nothing I can do to make God love me more means that wherever I am, He loves me perfectly. I need no special building, no special intermediary, no special form of words, to bring me into a state whereby God can love me more. I cannot earn His love, or bargain for His love, or even deserve His love. It comes because He is love.

There is nothing I can do to make God love me less. This means that when I sin, and disappoint Him, and grieve Him, by what I do (or more likely fail to do), He is still there loving me no less. Jesus told the story of the father whose son took his share of the family property, then went off and wasted it all. The father was waiting for this son's return all the time, and when the son finally came to his senses, and returned confessing all, the response was simply 'prepare a feast, for my son was lost and is found, was dead and is alive again.' Thus God waits for us whenever we stray, and wherever we stray, and however we stray.

Any teaching that claims to tell us how we can make God love us more, what we must do to earn God's blessings, is a denial of what is central to the gospel Jesus preached, to the grace of God in His gift of salvation. Once restored into God's family, we do need to understand what sort of people He wants us to be. The pattern of Paul's letters was always first to proclaim the basis on which we have been saved, and then guidance on how to live the Christ-life that has been breathed into us. Our sins will grieve the Holy Spirit, sure enough, but God's willingness to forgive us is constant.

So this Christmas, amid all the present giving and receiving, remember the child in the crib: