This Christmas message is from a talk I gave yesterday in our Christmas Eve service at church…

At this time of the year when we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ with beautiful music and we also read about that miraculous birth of Jesus in the scriptures.

In Isiah we read, “For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given.”

Then there are the familiar Christmas stories in Luke, John, and Mathew. They are wonderful, full of the spirit, and their telling has become spiritual traditions around the world.

A few weeks ago as I was preparing for my Sunday School lesson that I gave last week, I asked myself the question, “Why, why was it Jesus specifically?”

Then a quick follow-up question to that, “Why not another from the premortal existence where we lived with our Heavenly Father?”

There were others, one in particular, but they were not chosen.

As I pondered on it I realized that Christ was willing, He also had a better plan, and He loved us dearly, but most of all…He was humble.

How so? He wanted our Heavenly Father to receive all the glory and honor of this wonderful plan of salvation, the plan of happiness.

But it was even more than that. Jesus loved us so much He is our advocate to the Father, to plead our case for our eternal salvation individually, one-on-one, personally.

And for this He would not only pay the price for our sins, He would suffer all of our pains, all our sicknesses, and all our fears.

He would suffer everything of ours to know us, to love us for who we truly are as a child of God.

I mention again what I believe to be Jesus’s most qualifying trait to be the Christ…Humility.

“Why so?” you might ask.

As we read once again the wonderful Christmas stories of His birth and as we listen to beautiful Christmas season music, it is easy to envision that small child wrapped in swaddling clothes laying in a stable manger 2,000 years ago.

How incredibly humble is that to start His earthly mission…His mission for us, for all of us.

I testify that Jesus is the Christ. He lives, He loves each of us, He is working to bring us back to our Father in Heaven. Jesus is the Son of God, it is His mission to bring us back. That small, innocent, pure infant in that manger so long ago.