This is Christmas Day.

The day is finally here. Hopefully you’ve already had a great time of giving and receiving and celebrating Christ’s birth.

But do you really understand Christmas?

It’s all about incarnation. This word simply means “in the flesh,” and it describes what Jesus did. John 1 says that Jesus is fully God and has always existed, and was even involved in creation. But then John says, “the Word became human and lived here on earth among us” (John 1:14). Today’s passage from Philippians puts it even more dramatically: “He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form.”

Imagine that you created a colony of ants in your yard. You love those ants and do your best to protect, feed, and help them. You want to communicate your love for them, but everything you try just frightens them. After all, they see you as gigantic and hear your voice as a roar. So what can you do to get through? Write a big sign? Radio the message? Grab one or two and try to get close to them? They just wouldn’t get it.

The only way to communicate effectively would be to become an ant yourself, to somehow put aside your size, power, and prestige and become a tiny insect crawling around in the dirt.

That’s exactly what Jesus did. He left his heavenly home and put aside the unlimited use of his divine powers and shrunk himself to our size, becoming a mere speck in the vast universe that he had created. He became a baby human.

And Jesus did this because of love—for you and everyone else on earth. That’s Christmas.

Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

To Do

Take a few minutes and list all the gifts you have received from God, beginning with the incarnation. Then thank God for each one.

Also on this day

1896—John Philip Sousa titled his melody “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

1914—During World War I, British and German troops observed an unofficial truce and even played soccer together on the Western Front.

From Betsy Schmitt and Dave Veerman, 365 Trivia Twist Devotions: An Almanac of Fun Facts and Spiritual Truth for Every Day of the Year (Cincinnati: Standard, 2005). Scripture quotations are from the New Living Translation unless otherwise noted.