Christmas Moments - #2 - Hope and The Crimson Worm

Looking for that perfect Christmas gift for the family? Why not a chicken? Stick a bow on top, put the chicken under the tree, and who knows, you may even have a couple eggs to fry up for breakfast Christmas morning.

Give the gift that keeps on clucking. A chicken. Okay, maybe it's not the perfect gift for your family, but it is the perfect gift for a poor family in Asia. A chicken can break the cycle of poverty for a poor family. Yes, a chicken.

A chicken's eggs provide food and nourishment for a family, and they can sell those eggs at the market for income. When you donate a chicken or any other animal through Gospel for Asia, 100% of what you give goes to the field. And the best gift of all, when Gospel for Asia gives a poor family an animal, it opens the door to the love of Jesus. So give the perfect gift for a family in Asia this Christmas. Give them a chicken.

Call 866-WIN-ASIA. Or to see chickens and other animals to donate, go to CritterCampaign.org. Think about the father for a minute, and he painted this picture so vividly throughout the Old Testament. It's absolutely incredible. And one of the ways that I've discovered this week was through what is called the crimson worm. I bet you never heard of the crimson worm.

But it turns out that you may have heard the scarlet thread that goes through the Bible that they're talking about. Well, that scarlet thread is made as a result of this crimson worm. And the crimson, they would get the dye from this worm.

And the way that they would get the dye in order to make the red thread that they actually made, you know, the curtains in the temple and the red thread that Rahab threw out the window, all those threads were made from this crimson worm. And this worm as a female would, when it began to reach a certain age where it could have babies, it would attach itself to a tree. And then it would begin to dye. And as it would lay its eggs, it would turn this crimson red color. But then the babies actually would then feed on their mother's decaying body and drink her blood, so to speak. And then they would also be stained red. And then as this happened, right, the tree would be stained red. And there's pictures of this, by the way, at ChristianCarguy.com.

So here's this crimson. And the ancients, they discovered a very expensive process to extract this red dye from the worm in order to, you know, make this red that they used to make royal garments. And so when you read in Psalm 22 verse 6, Jesus quoted that one on the cross when he said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Well, earlier in that Psalm, David said, I am a worm. But he's not just any worm. He's this particular—and when you look at the Hebrew in it, he's calling out a particular worm, which happens to be this crimson worm. And it really, really brings me hope because when you begin to follow the thread that God is going to talk about, the very word for hope in the Bible is that tikavah. It has to do with this crimson. It has to do with this red. It has to do with how God the Father was going to send his son just like I was standing at those hospital doors. He was going to send Jesus knowing that this crimson red hope would be there on your Christmas and my Christmas here in 2019.