To focus on anything other than what is good or to focus on physical world as Source of anything is only true sin. The other main message is that guilt will block your spiritual connection so that your prayers will not be answered, and you should do whatever it takes to relieve your guilt, which may be as simple as giving it up. "Your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more."

There is strong wisdom in concept of controlling your desires, however, since spending all of your time with them will prevent you from doing good work for others. This is another message in phrase from book of James about motive. When you are trying to serve others, you receive more freely, but when you are only out for yourself, you will not receive freely.

I like Wayne Dyer's explanation of this. If you are constantly asking universe (God) "what can you give me?", universe will constantly ask you what can you give. But if you are constantly asking universe "what can I give?", then universe will constantly be giving to you. Some people call this karma or Law of Cause and Effect. I see this as Power of Spirit simply magnifying focus of your mind.

On practical side, it works like this. When someone comes up to you with an attitude of trying to sell you something so they can take your money, you will push them away quickly without looking at what they have. But if someone else comes up to you with obvious interest in helping you get what you want, you will look and possibly purchase what they have, even though it may be same thing.

This is why commercial advertising and marketing is starting to take radical shifts to a more personal approach. It simply works better. If you've ever worked as a salesperson, you may have noticed that when you are focused on trying to help people, you sell more. But if you are focused on making your commissions, sales elude you.

In our exchange of gifts, we honor life that Christ lived.

The messages that Christ spoke of during His ministry centered around 2 main principles - faith and love.

We are encouraged to love everyone as we love ourselves, and we are instructed that if we have faith that our prayers will be answered then they will be answered according to our faith.

Faith is sometimes seen as a tricky thing. Either you have it or you don't. Many times, we wonder if there is any way to increase amount of faith that we have so that our prayers will be more effective in our lives.

Most people tend to pray for one of three things - health, financial abundance, or good relationships. The message of Christ was that we could have anything we wanted if we had enough faith.

In act of giving gifts, we are generally acting out of love, with faith that there will be enough financial abundance to fulfill our needs even after giving of gifts.

By giving gifts, we open ourselves to wondrous free flow of Spiritual energy into our souls, which then blesses us in many ways. Yes, we can improve our health and our prosperity by giving gifts.

With so many reasons to be giving gifts, it's really no wonder why Christmas-time became best reason in world for gift giving.

May you be blessed by giving of gifts this year.