Merry Christmas and happy birthday! A toast to those of you who, like me, share the great fortune and greater misfortune of being born on December 25th. A great fortune, I say, because your birthday will almost definitely fall on a public holiday. But a greater misfortune because everyone will be too busy celebrating Christmas to take any notice of you. You will probably get one “big” combined present instead of two. And I can’t tell you the untold damage my parents caused when they refused to hold a birthday party for me on the grounds that “nobody will come”. I have known fellow Christmas day babies who have selected another date as their birthday for the only purpose of, well, actually enjoying one.
As I sit here recalling my misspent birthdays, it occurs to me that this conflict is an apt allegory of my daily and lifelong battle with Jesus – for glory. My birthday is my special day. Far be it for me to have to share it with anyone, let alone someone who will take all the attention away from me! And so I am like the child who sulks and throws tantrums because of all the adulation he should be getting but ain’t.
It is easy to praise God. Words are cheap. It costs nothing to pay God lip service upon the podium of our self-declared victory. When we blithely say, “praise God”, how much of it is a secret rejoicing in ourselves? Perhaps congratulating ourselves on a decision wisely made? Boasting, not of God’s goodness, but our faithfulness?
The test comes when there is only place for one of you: who then will have pride of place? Will I happily take obscurity and lowliness so that God may be exalted? Jesus says that those who pray and give and fast to be praised by men have already received their reward in full; but those who do so in secret will be rewarded by the Father (Matthew 6). Surely, this is powerful motivation to labour in secret!
A birthday seems such a trifling thing to give away, and still, I struggle. It betrays a niggling desire to keep a little glory for myself, a desire that is perhaps in all of us but only made apparent when we are asked to relinquish it. Only then do we realize how deep our pride runs. How ME is imprinted in my every thought.
When I was little, growing up in a non-Christian family, I used to think (in the magic thinking way of little children) that I ought to be a Christian because I was born on Christmas Day. And in some strange, ironic way, I think that has become true. Because Jesus’ birth has brought me the promise of new birth; His life is credited as mine; his glory, also mine to boast of. So now each Christmas, I am chastened with the reminder that my life is indeed hid with Christ, that I must become lesser and He, greater, and that my utmost joy is for Him, not I, to have every and all the praise and adoration and glory He deserves.
Happy Birthday, Jesus.
Originally posted on our family website, February 2011
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