Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
Why Love Is The Heart Of Christmas
The calendar says one week to Christmas, but the list of what you need to do before the 25th might be stressing you out. Between the gift buying, and the meal preperations, Hallmark plots, and the hum of carols, today we pause to ask a sharper question: what sits at the centre of Christmas for you? We share why this matters when lines get long and tempers run short, and how love redirects the week from performance to presence. Grace threads through every practice—not as a shortcut, but as the strength that lets love outlast hurry. Let your plans serve people, not pressure. And when you miss the mark, start again, because love endures through every circumstance. Take five minutes with us to reset your day and your week. If this conversation helps you breathe a little deeper and love a little better, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help others find the show.
Good morning, and welcome to Starting Right. I am Danny Mack, and I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting right. Wow, it's hard to believe that Christmas is a week away. But here we are with one week to go and all of the things that we still have to do. The baking, the gifts that we need to buy or wrap or get into the mail, or the listening to the Christmas carols, watching all of the Christmas Hallmark movies that come on TV. Christmas has got a lot of things going on with it. If I was to ask you what you thought the most important aspect of Christmas was, what what would you say? Would you say it's in the giving? Would you say it's in the receiving? Maybe it's about family. Maybe it's about joy. Maybe it's about celebrating. Maybe it's about something else along those lines. But what would you say the emphasis for Christmas is for you and your family and your home? What if I were to tell you that God's greatest emphasis at Christmas time was love? For God so loved the world that he gave his son. It's about love. It's about God's love for us, where Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth for one purpose to die on the cross for our sins so that we could have a relationship with God. That's love. And the Bible has a lot to say about love. It teaches us so much about it. Over in First Corinthians chapter 13, this is what's known as the love chapter in the Bible. From verse 4 down to verse 8, it says this Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice, but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. That's quite a list of what love is. And I don't know if it's as hard for you to keep them in practice as it is for me, but sometimes I really struggle with maintaining all of those things in my life. Now don't get me wrong, I believe that these are very powerful and important truths about how we need to live our lives as followers of Jesus Christ. But putting it into practice the way Paul is describing, that's tough. Love is patient, and it doesn't demand its own way. Those two actions by themselves are tough enough because they require us to put someone else's needs ahead of our own. We tend to filter most of life through a lens of what's in it for me. We have many things that we need, but we don't always allow time for patience. We want too many things our way and in our timing. And keeping no record of being wronged is just about impossible in any relationship with friends or family members or co-workers for any length of time at all. That's hard to deal with. I know I'm guilty of that. So I ask you, how how are you doing with not keeping a record of being wronged? How are you doing with your list of people you need to forgive and not hold a grudge against, no matter what they may have done to you? And all of this, there's the good news of Jesus Christ that in him all things are possible, and we can love others through the grace that he gives us. If the theme of Christmas truly is love, how are you doing in living up to Paul's action points here in 1 Corinthians 13? Now don't get discouraged, because we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, and God wants more than anything else for us to experience His love in our lives, but also to be able to share it with everybody around us. Sometimes showing love begins with a choice. Choose to love. So as we go into this last week before Christmas, and we look at all the things we have to do and the pressures around us, I encourage you to choose love. Choose to love the people around you, to be patient, to not be irritable, to not keep any record of any wrongs, but just to celebrate the goodness of God to us. Have a great day, my friends. We'll talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.
