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“Some gifts by their very nature make you swallow your pride.”

A thought by Timothy Keller (2016-10-25) from his book, Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ (p. 17). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

We are going to head next week to Las Vegas where our daughter, Stef, our son-in-law, Andrew and our youngest granddaughter, Harper live.  Our son, Brett and his family will also be coming.  We are going to be celebrating Christmas together this year.  But we have a problem.  I’m not sure that we can fit in our Kia Sportage all the gifts that Margaret and I have bought for our family.  But we are going to try. 

Now I hadn’t thought of the fact that some presents cause us to swallow our pride but as Tim says I can see they can.

He says, “Imagine opening a present on Christmas morning from a friend— and it’s a dieting book. Then you take off another ribbon and wrapper and you find it is another book from another friend, Overcoming Selfishness. If you say to them, ‘Thank you so much,’ you are in a sense admitting, ‘For indeed I am fat and obnoxious.’ In other words, some gifts are hard to receive, because to do so is to admit you have flaws and weaknesses and you need help. Perhaps on some occasion you had a friend who figured out you were in financial trouble and came to you and offered a large sum of money to get you out of your predicament. If that has ever happened to you, you probably found that to receive the gift meant swallowing your pride.”

Tim goes on, “There has never been a gift offered that makes you swallow your pride to the depths that the gift of Jesus Christ requires us to do. Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.”

He then says, “To accept the true Christmas gift, you have to admit you’re a sinner. You need to be saved by grace. You need to give up control of your life. That is descending lower than any of us really wants to go. Yet Jesus Christ’s greatness is seen in how far down he came to love us. Your spiritual regeneration and eventual greatness will be achieved by going down the same path. He descended into greatness, and the Bible says it’s only through repentance that you come into his light.”


So have you swallow your pride and accepted his life changing gift?
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