Sacrifice began with the manger

"O come, thou king of nations bring
an end to all our suffering.
Bid every pain and sorrow cease
and reign now as our Prince of Peace."

I'm not sure I've ever made it to verse five of the Christmas hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel."

It touched me today, for some reason. Thinking that generations longed for Emmanuel to come, to truly be the meaning of that word --- "God with us." We are so blessed that Jesus has come, that he has conquered sin and death by dying on the cross and rising again.

What has also been on my mind lately is how much God gave up to come. We think of Jesus' suffering around Easter time, when we celebrate that he died on the cross and took on our sin so that we can be forgiven and no longer have to face eternal death. He suffered more than we could ever imagine.

Yet, that suffering started much earlier. It started when he took on flesh.

God is so much bigger than we can imagine. We can't fathom that he works without time controlling him, without dimensions controlling him. We have a shallow view of who he is, because we are under the laws of time and space. He isn't.

He still decided to come and give up so much of himself to limit himself to a human body, but also to limit himself to our one-dimensional time, our four-dimensional world.

What if we gave up one of our dimensions? How much would that limit us? What if we could only walk sideways and see two dimensions? It would be so frustrating knowing that the world is so much bigger and we could do so much more if we didn't have this limitation.

I'm sure God's world is more than five dimensions; I'm sure he gave up more than just one. So, imagine how much he limited himself to take on a human body. It was sacrifice, suffering, humiliation from the very beginning.

Did he complain?

No.

For some reason, he decided to help. He didn't help the angels when they rebelled. He didn't decide to make a way to save Satan and the demons. When humans rebelled though, God decided to intervene, out of love.

So this year, I not only look at the nativity with gratefulness for what Jesus was about to do later in his life but for gratefulness for what he did then. Thank you God for taking on the humiliation of the human form, for loving us so much that you gave up so much from the very beginning to become one of us. Thank you for coming to Earth to save us from our sins.

Merry Christmas, and may this season remind you of how much God sacrificed for us, how much Jesus sacrificed for us from the very moment he entered Mary's womb.