Am I pressing the point too much to say that the world is filled with such innkeepers today, materialistic men, women, and children who miss the meaning of Christmas simply because their business, parties, Christmas cards, trees, or tinsel seem too pressing? If this were not the case, there would not be so many grim faces in our stores or so many exhausted, sleepy people in our churches the Sunday before Christmas.

Finally, the way of the Lord is the only way. By that, I don't mean that there are no other ways that contend for our attention. But Jesus did say that he is the way, and that no one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6). He is the only way that will get us to our goal. What is our goal? Our goal is to be with God and to have fellowship with him forever and ever. He made us in his image, and our goal is to be molded into the image of Christ that we might be all that he intends us to be, and to be made like Christ perfectly in the life to come.

The question I want to ask at this point is whether you've had an experience similar to that of the wise men. Was there a time in your life when you looked for the solution to your own problems from a secular answer? Whether your problem was insecurity, guilt, or lack of direction, you thought that you would find the answer by secular success, wealth, sex, pleasure or whatever it may be. Perhaps you looked for these things and yet like the wise men, you found them to be unsatisfactory. 

A number of years ago, I came across a Christian tract that was entitled Famous Last Words. It contained in it the last words of a number of well-known men. The point of the tract was that what the men said at the very end of their lives was significant. For those men who were not Christians, it revealed the weakness of their philosophy in the face of death, and in the case of Christians, their last words testified to the strength of the Christian gospel.

We looked at the spiritual significance of each of the three gifts given to Jesus by the wise men: gold, frankincense, and myrrh—gold for royalty, frankincense for the purity of his life, and myrrh for suffering. And yet the study would be incomplete unless I were also to take you to one other verse that bears upon the gifts of the wise men.