One of the things that has grown my love for Christ in recent years is a deeper understanding of the great sacrifice it was for Him to come to this Earth. While I have long considered His death on the cross a testament to the depths of His love, the realization that this was the culmination of His sacrifice and not the beginning of it has been more recently imprinted on my heart. The emptying of Himself did not commence when He was nailed to a tree; it started when the Creator of the world relinquished Heaven to take on human form. His sacrifice started at His arrival, not His departure.
As we prepare our hearts to celebrate the occasion of His birth, I want to understand more deeply what He gave up when He took on flesh and dwelt among us. If God allows, I plan to share a reflection every Sunday of this advent season, each one focusing on something that Christ sacrificed when He came to this world. My hope is that as a result, our gratitude for Him may deepen and grow.
The first thing that I want to focus on is found in 2 Corinthians 8:9, which states, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (ESV). When talking about the one and only God of the Universe, “rich’ almost seems to understate the enormity of what He owns. This world, the cosmos, everything that is or was or will come, is His. Although riches is often considered in finite terms – a quantifiable extent of abundance – for Christ, His riches in Heaven were limitless. There was nothing that was not His. He never experienced want or deprivation; He never had to “make do” with something that was insubstantial or inferior. All was created through Him and for Him (Col. 1:16); to His Kingdom there was no end (Isaiah 9:7).
Yet Christ didn’t cling to what was His. Instead, He not only gave up His abundance, but He took on lack. Think about it – Christ could have chosen a nice, middle class family to be His earthly parents, but those are not the conditions that were sovereignly ordained. He choose to be poor. He choose to be raised by a family who was so far down the economic ladder that they could not bring the normative animal sacrifice to celebrate His birth. His arrival was worthy of trumpets and processions, of celebration and elation. Instead, his earthly caretakers brought him to the temple with the minimal acceptable offering. And it wasn’t because they were being stingy; it was because this is what they could afford. Everything was His, yet He gave up His rightful claim to the riches of Heaven and of Earth, to take on a condition of scarcity and lack.
As we celebrate our Savior’s birth, let us remember that His incarnation came at great cost. Let us look past the excess and elaborateness that often characterizes this season and remember that the One who had everything, set it aside for your sake, and for mine. The humble servant came to humble circumstances perhaps in part to remind us that what we have is not nearly as important as Whose we are. While Jesus walked this Earth he did not have much in terms of worldly possessions – he didn’t even have a place to lay his head or call his home (Mt. 8:20) – but He did have this – He was doing the will of the One who sent Him (John 4:34). And because of His perfect obedience, because He was willing to lay aside the riches that were His to take on meagerness and poverty, we may experience true riches – a right relationship with Him.
If Christ had been born to a family that was more economically secure, we may not as readily realize the disparity between what He had on this Earth, and what He was willing to give up. But had Christ been born in a palace, He still would have sacrificed riches to come to this Earth, because the riches of Heaven can not compare to any found here. Yet Christ made it abundantly obvious – He became poor, from an earthly perspective and from a Heavenly one, so that we may become rich from the perspective that should matter most to us, the perspective of eternity.
