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.

42. Certain it is that this Ancient Church was a representative Church, which, in visible and natural types and signs, figured forth the invisible and spiritual things of the Church which was yet to come, when Jehovah Himself would manifest Himself in a natural human form, and by this means secure for Himself entrance to men, and for men access to Himself, and thus would divest Himself of types, and found a Church with precepts which should lead all who believe on Him as Man, and do His commandments, by a ready way to heaven, the dwelling-place of His Divinity. But, inasmuch as this Ancient Church, typical of that which was to come, turned the representative correspondences into magic and idolatry, and thus into things infernal, Jehovah raised up the Israelitish Church, in which He restored the primitive types, which were heavenly: such types were all the tabernacles, feasts, sacrifices, priesthoods, the garments of Aaron and his sons, and the anointings; besides the statutes in a long series which were promulgated through Moses.