It was one of redemptive history’s strangest moments. When the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, God
was conceived in human flesh. The baby
in the manger was no ordinary child; he was the Son of God, God incarnate.
The irony is that the Son of God, the Eternal King, the
Prince of Peace, was not born to a king, but to a carpenter. His bedding was straw, not satin. The One of whom the seraphim had cried “Holy,
holy, holy” was now attended by donkeys.
There were no nurses or nannies, only the shepherds from the
hillside. I would not have wanted one of
my children to be born in the kind of filth that accompanied the birth of the
Christ child. And yet that is how a
sovereign God sent his only son to earth.
Why? Why would God
subject Jesus to this? There are at
least two reasons. First, we know that
it was part of God’s plan to redeem sinners.
Jesus came to be our Savior and our Lord. But why did he come in poverty, in obscurity,
in squalor? I believe he did this as an
example of the life that pleases God. Jesus
came to this earth to walk the way of the cross. Those who would follow him must deny
themselves, take up their cross and follow him on that path.
Philippians 2 tells us that Jesus, in his very nature God,
did not grasp his divine privilege, but emptied himself to come to earth as a
man. He came, the first time, “to seek
and to save that which was lost.” He
walked in humility and obedience to the Father, even to the point of offering
himself as the Lamb of God to be sacrificed for the sins of the world. In Gethsemane ,
Jesus made it clear that the idea of becoming sin horrified him. He sweated drops of blood in anticipation of
bearing our sins in his body. Yet, in
humility, he obeyed the Father’s plan.
“Not my will, but your will be done.”
We are called to the “fellowship of sharing in his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”
The Christian life is not a means to attaining our ambitions, or getting
ahead, or getting what we want from life.
It is a way of humility, of crucifixion.
I must follow Jesus on the walk to the cross. I must die to self, to my ambitions, my dreams,
my goals, my plans. My life no longer
belongs to me, it is his. My plans are
not my own, they are his. We are
crucified with Christ.
But Jesus’ humility, his sacrifice, his death, was not the
end of the story. Philippians 2 goes on
to tell us that God exalted Jesus to the highest place and gave him the name
that is above every name. The “Infant
Holy, Infant Lowly” of the Christmas story is now the “King of kings and Lord
of lords.”
You and I will never be King of kings. We are not meant to be. But when we walk the way of the cross, when
we humble ourselves, we receive more from God than we ever give up. He infuses our lives with his glory. He exalts us to the heavenly places and seats
us there with Christ. He has place the
Holy Spirit in us, and fills us with his presence and power.
The Christmas story bids us to walk the path Jesus walked; the
path of humility, the way of the cross.
Those that do this come to know the real joy of Christmas.
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