Luke 2:6-7 “While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Everyday there are people who want to worm their way into my life. I receive junk emails from people in other countries who claim that they want to send me millions of dollars. As friendly as their offers sound, I won’t be seeking a relationship with any of them.

I receive telemarketing calls and texts on my cell phone. Often it’s a recorded message telling me I have won something or making a credit card offer. I don’t press the number to talk to a live person or return the call.

Sales people visit my office with various proposals. They would like to do janitorial work, or building maintenance, or design our audio-visual system. Those are all legitimate services, and I don’t fault them for asking. But I know they don’t ask because they are deeply concerned about me or my church. They are mostly concerned about drumming up some business for themselves.

At Christmas, someone came who wanted to work his way into our lives. The things he promised could sound as outlandish as the junk emails promising millions for nothing. But he didn’t come to take advantage of our gullibility, or merely to drum up business for himself. He isn’t running a scam. He doesn’t practice a trade. He genuinely came to give, and to serve. One way I know this is that, when he came, he embraced a manger as his first bed. That is an astounding truth not just because of the lowliness of it all, but the enormity of the one who squeezed himself into that little space.

In the final scenes of the final book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, the children who are the heroes of the series take refuge from a battle in a little shed or barn. On the outside it is just a little building. But when they go through the door, they find a whole new world on the inside. This shed is, if you will, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. One of the children observes, ““In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

That, of course, is the scene in front of us at Christmas. A stable, and a manger, contained the eternal God who is bigger than the whole universe.

It all sounds a little claustrophobic, doesn’t it–to go from filling and exceeding the entire universe to living in a cramped little body in a cramped little box in a cramped little building? But that’s what a loving Savior does when he comes down. He isn’t merely willing to spend time with little people. He makes himself small–smaller, and poorer than the average soul. He came to be our servant, you see. So he embraces the humility of a manger, and later on a little cross of wood, and after that a cold, stone tomb, where for three days they sealed the lifeless body of the eternal God who fills all things.

He did it so that we, too, could be bigger on the inside than we are on the outside. He did it so that saving faith, and the infinite God, and endless love could live in our little hearts. He did it so that one day we could come up to the vast expanse of his home above, where he lives, and his love rules, forever.

At Christmas I am thankful that he found his way into my world, and into my heart.