All for love's sake

I've been trying to wrap my mind around the Christmas story, Christ coming to earth, God incarnate and yet man. I always thought I understood how much he gave up, how low he really stooped, at least to some degree. I was reminded once again of how little I actually know. My pastor preached a sermon about the humiliation of Christ, which is easy to assume starts in the garden of Gethsemane, but he argued, begins from his conception in Mary's womb. God literally became nothing. He grew up in a town called Nazareth, a place noone would think the Messiah could come from. His earthly father was a carpenter, and he was born in a stable, probably not the nicest one either. How to understand this: that the eternal God became a nobody for us. As the great hymn goes:

Thou who was rich beyond all splendour,
All for love's sake becamest poor,
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who was rich beyond all splendour,
All for love's sake becamest poor...

Perhaps the reason why this really hit me this Sunday as I sat in church is that I have a fear of being nobody, of dying and nobody thinking my life was important in any way, of being forgotten by the course of history. This fear has been unusually strong recently and I've been battling it for a few months now. To think that Jesus became nothing and yet the temptation to be somebody was with him everyday. He was God after all, and people said of him, "what good can come from Nazareth?" I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to continually humble yourself, to orient yourself to the Father without fail, to deny yourself an innate human desire to be the king he was.

And this is my calling...to be "content to fill a little space, if thou be glorified." There is contentment in knowing your place, and hope knowing that the Almighty God confined himself to his when he became a man. This Christmas I rejoice in Christ's willing humiliation for my sake.