The day after Christmas can feel strangely quiet. Yesterday was full of light and music and celebration; today the wrapping paper is in the trash, the house is a bit still, and real life waits at the door. Into that quiet, hear Jesus’ words to His disciples on the night before the cross: He told them He would not leave them abandoned, like children with no one coming back for them. That promise is not just for a frightened group in an upper room; it is for you, right here, in the ordinary and in the ache of this day.

He Knows the Fear Behind Your Silence

When Jesus said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18), He was looking at men who had left everything to follow Him. They had banked their entire future on Him, and now He was talking about going away. Beneath their questions was a deep fear: “Will we be left alone? Was this all for nothing?” Jesus didn’t brush that fear aside; He named it and answered it. He wanted them to know that in a world of broken promises, His word stands unshaken.

Maybe you know that orphan-fear too—the fear that people leave, that prayers hit the ceiling, that you don’t really belong anywhere. God meets that fear head‑on. “Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me” (Psalm 27:10). And He has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Your security is not in how tightly you can hold on to Him, but in how firmly He holds on to you.

The God Who Comes Back for You

Yesterday we celebrated that God came near in a manger. “They will call Him Immanuel” — “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). That same Jesus, now risen and reigning, is the One who says, “I will come to you” (John 14:18). He is not a distant manager checking in from time to time; He is the Shepherd who comes back for His sheep, the Bridegroom who will not forget His bride. “If I go and prepare a place for you,” He promises, “I will come back and welcome you into My presence” (John 14:3).

But His promise is not only about a future return; it is about a present presence. He spoke of giving “another Advocate… the Spirit of truth” who would be with us and in us (see John 14:16–17). By His Spirit, Jesus keeps His word to come to His people right now. “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Romans 8:16). You don’t just remember a Savior who once walked the earth; you walk with a Savior who is here, by His Spirit, in your very heart.

Walking Through Today Like an Adopted Child

If you belong to Christ, you are not a spiritual orphan trying to survive; you are an adopted child learning to live like you’re loved. “You did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship, by whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Romans 8:15). That means you can bring God your confusion, your temptations, your loneliness today—not as a stranger knocking on a closed door, but as a child coming home.

So what would it look like to walk through this day as someone who is not alone? It might mean choosing trust instead of worry in that one situation that keeps you up at night. It might mean obedience in the quiet place where it would be easier to compromise. It might mean reaching out to someone else who feels forgotten, because your Father’s heart beats in you. And as you go, hear Jesus whisper again, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Lord Jesus, thank You that You have not left us as orphans but have come to us. Today, help me live as Your loved child—trusting Your presence and obeying Your voice in every step I take. Amen.

Dr. Moody Stuart, a great praying man of a past generation, once drew up a set of rules to guide him in his prayers. Among these rules is this one: "Pray till you pray." The difference between praying till you quit and praying till you pray is illustrated by the American evangelist John Wesley Lee. He often likened a eason of prayer to a church service, and insisted that many of us close the meeting before the service is over. He confessed that once he arose too soon from a prayer session and started down the street to take care of some pressing business. He had only gone a short distance when an inner voice reproached him. "Son," the voice seemed to say, "did you not pronounce the benediction before the meeting was ended?" He understood, and at once hurried back to the place of prayer where he tarried till the burden lifted and the blessing came down.

The habit of breaking off our prayers before we have truly prayed is as common as it is unfortunate. Often the last ten minutes may mean more to us than the first half hour, because we must spend a long time getting into the proper mood to pray effectively. We may need to struggle with our thoughts to draw them in from where they have been scattered through the multitude of distractions that result from the task of living in a disordered world.

Here, as elsewhere in spiritual matters, we must be sure to distinguish the ideal from the real. Ideally we should be living moment-by-moment in a state of such perfect union with God that no special preparation is necessary. But actually there are few who can honestly say that this is their experience. Candor will compel most of us to admit that we often experience a struggle before we can escape from the emotional alienation and sense of unreality that sometimes settle over us as a sort of prevailing mood.

Whatever a dreamy idealism may say, we are forced to deal with things down on the level of practical reality. If when we come to prayer our hearts feel dull and unspiritual, we should not try to argue ourselves out of it. Rather, we should admit it frankly and pray our way

through. Some Christians smile at the thought of "praying through," but something of the same idea is found in the writings of practically every great praying saint from Daniel to the present day. We cannot afford to stop praying till we have actually prayed.

Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching. Verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.. - Luke 12:37

The first idea in watchfulness is keeping awake, and the second is looking out for something that is coming. Both these conceptions are intertwined in both our Lord’s use of the metaphor of the watching servant and in the echoes of it which we find abundantly in the Apostolic letters. The first thing is to keep ourselves awake all through the soporific night, when everything tempts to slumber. Even the wise virgins, with trimmed lamps and girt loins, do in some degree succumb to the drowsy influences around them, and, like the foolish ones, slumber, though the slumbers of the two classes be unlike. Christian people live in the midst of an order of things which tempts them to close the eyes of their hearts and minds to all the real and unseen glories above and around them and that might be within them, and to live for the comparatively contemptible and trivial things of this present. Just as when a man sleeps he loses his consciousness of the solid external realities, and passes into a fantastic world of his own imaginations, which have no correspondence in external facts, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision if but a poor cock shall crow, so the men who are conscious only of this present life and of the things that are seen, though they pride themselves on being wide awake, are, in the deepest of their being, fast asleep, and are dealing with illusions which shall pass and leave nought behind, as really as are men who lie upon dreaming couches and fancy themselves hard at work. Keep awake; that is the first thing, which, being translated into plain English, points just to this, that, unless we make a dead lift of continuous effort to keep firm grasp of God and Christ, and of all the unseen magnificences that are included in these two words, as surely as we live we shall lose our hold upon them, and fall into the drugged and diseased sleep in which so many men around us are plunged. It sometimes seems to one as if the sky above us were raining down narcotics upon us, so profoundly are the bulk of men unconscious of realities and befooled by the illusions of a dream.

Many of us have to acknowledge that the fervour of early days has died down into coldness. The river that leapt from its source rejoicing, and bickered amongst the hills in such swift and musical descent, creeps sluggish and almost stagnant amongst the flats of later life, or has been lost and swallowed up altogether in the thirsty and encroaching sands of a barren worldliness. Do not let your Christian life be like that snow that is on the ground - when it first lights upon the earth, radiant and white, but day by day more covered with a veil of sooty blackness until it becomes dark and foul. Even early failures, recognised and repented of, may make a man better fitted for the tasks which once he fled from. Just as they tell us that a broken bone renewed is stronger at the point of fracture than it ever was before, so the very sin that we commit, when once we know it for a sin, and have brought it to Christ for forgiveness, may minister to our future efficiency and strength.

The past is no specimen of what the future may be. The page that is yet to be written need have none of the blots of the page that we have turned over shining through it. The sin which we have learned to know for a sin and to hate teaches us humility, dependence - shows us where the weak places are; sin which is forgiven knits us to Christ with deeper and more fervid love, and results in a larger consecration.