Some Gifts Confront You

There are some gifts that confront you.

When I first met with the pastor of the church we attended while I was in seminary, we had a good conversation, prayed together, and as I was getting ready to leave, he said, "I have a book for you."

He handed me a little book titled Humility by Andrew Murray.

The gift itself says something, doesn't it?

What if your spouse got you a book on "How to Be Kind"? What if they bought you a treadmill? What if your friends bought you a diet book? To receive that kind of gift means you have to swallow your pride. You have to admit, "Apparently, I need this."

This Christmas, how much more is that true when you realize what God has done in offering you the gift of a child – and that you actually need this to happen. The lengths to which God goes to rescue people require us to acknowledge that this gift says something about us.

Advent is a celebration of God stepping out of heaven and wrapping himself in flesh. Christians call it the incarnation.

And that incarnation is a confrontation. A confrontation of what we value. A confrontation of what we worship. A confrontation that brings us face-to-face with the most important person in the universe.

But it's not just a confrontation. It's also a comfort. Comfort for people rolling into the Christmas season who are tired, hurting, and broken. Comfort for people whose lives are not neat and tidy.

Incarnation is the staggering claim that Jesus is God made man – or as the gospel of John says, "the Word became flesh." It means the babyhood of God is reality.

If you've been around church most of your life, this can start to feel normal. These truths get baked in, and the wonder of it can begin to fade. But think for a moment about what we are really saying.

The incarnation is not simply, "Jesus was a baby." The incarnation is that the eternal divine One – the Creator of all things, infinite in his being, infinite in his power, infinite in his joy, infinite in his knowledge, the One worshiped by angels and praised by all creation – that Person was willing to come into the world, take on our flesh, and live among us.

Think about it: God in flesh.

If this is true, then everyone, everywhere, owes absolute obedience to this one Jewish man. If the incarnation is true, his claim over everything is absolute. His teaching is not one opinion among many; it demands our full allegiance.

Through church history, Christians have struggled to find words big enough to describe it. Charles Wesley once called it, "God incomprehensibly made man." One thing the incarnation means is that God, in his grace, is willing to be vulnerable.

Walk down any hallway where there are newborns. When you see a baby lying there, you don't think, "They'll be fine if we just leave them." No – every instinct in you is to protect, to pick up, to care for that child. Babies are vulnerable.

And God chose that.

Jesus took his humanity from a woman he himself had created. He was carried by the hands he had formed. Mary is holding God. Mary is nursing her creator. Mary is looking down into the face of her ruler, savior, and king.

It means he was made like us in every way. It means he who made the devil could now be tempted by the devil. It means the eternal Son chose to experience our weakness. It means he can empathize with us. It means he would feel the effects of the fallen world intimately. God did not stay distant. God made himself vulnerable.

God puts on flesh and moves into the neighborhood – not to a palace, but to a feeding trough; not to a famous city, but to an overlooked village; not to influential parents, but to a young couple of common standing, under foreign occupation.

This is how God works.

He's not just a child born; he's a child given. A gift. And like all confronting gifts, you have to swallow your pride to receive him.

Why? Because when you look at the lengths God has gone to rescue us – the Son of God taking on flesh, entering our weakness, bearing our sin – it says something very humbling about us: we were so lost that nothing less than this would do.

That child in the manger is a confronting gift. He exposes our need. He humbles our pride. And at the very same time, he is our deepest comfort – God with us, God for us, God come to rescue us.