In the Christmas story, the wise men bring gifts to the Lord: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The gold is listed first, because it is the inmost - signifying good, e.g. the good that we do when we love the Lord and the neighbor.

The frankincense is next. It signifies rational truth, which is the set of true ideas that we know, not about external things like cars or cooking, but about what is really good, and what is really true.

These rational truths are built on earlier knowledges that we learn, before we have really made them our own. Those early knowledges about spiritual things - often learned in childhood - are represented by the myrrh.

In a way, these gifts are really a reciprocation. We can't actually give them to the Lord until the Lord has given them to us. We necessarily start out by learning and doing the Lord's law (myrrh). The Lord can then call up those memories to become rational truths (frankincense). Then, over time, and with effort, those truths can be transformed into good (gold). The wise men from the East had gone through this process of learning and becoming vessels that could receive truths and goods. They were able to perceive the Lord's birth, and find him, and bring gifts to him.

206. The reason why the science of correspondences, which allows one to grasp the spiritual sense of the Word, was not revealed after this period was that the Christians of the earliest church were very simple people, so it could not be revealed to them, since, had it been, it would not have been understood and would have been of no use to them. After their times darkness arose to cover the whole Christian world, first by the spread of a number of heresies, and soon afterwards by the decisions and decrees of the Council of Nicaea, about the existence of three Divine Persons from eternity, and about the Person of Christ as being the Son of Mary and not the Son of Jehovah God. That is the source from which gushed forth the current belief in justification, according to which three gods are approached in turn. On this belief depends every single detail of the church to-day, just as all the parts of the body are dependent upon the head. Because they used everything in the Word to prove this erroneous belief, the spiritual sense could not be revealed, for had it been, they would have used this sense for the same purpose. By this they would have profaned the very holiness of the Word, and thus completely closed heaven to themselves and banished the Lord from the church.