When Jesus Emptied Himself
My post for yesterday was about “Once in Royal David’s City.” That carol was the subject of my first Christmas Day post in 2013. Last week I looked back at previous posts about the carol and found no less than 12 posts! I was surprised! However, while looking back, I realized why. That carol is packed with powerful messages for homeschooling mamas.
For my 2021 post, I encouraged you mamas to think back to the birth of your first child and included a paraphrase of the carol’s first verse, describing our bringing home our firstborn baby boy in February 1979. Here’s my paraphrase:
Once in Oxford, Mississippi,
Stood a nursery painted blue
Where a mother laid her baby,
In a bassinet that held her, too.
Filled with fear and also joy
I was mother to that little boy.
The bassinet that once held me
and later John, Bethany, and Mary Evelyn
now holds porcelain dolls created by my mother’s Aunt Edna.
I love when our grandchildren ask,
“Can we play with the glass babies?”
My experience was quite a contrast to Mary’s experience as Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander described it in the first verse of her carol.
Once in royal David’s city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby,
In a manger for His bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ, her little Child.
The house where we lived in Mississippi when John was born wasn’t fancy, but it was a grand mansion compared to the humble place where our Savior lay after leaving Heaven and coming to earth to become one of us.
It is a great privilege to bear a child, to care for a child, to rear a child, to love a child. What a joy it is for us mamas to remember the moments when that privilege began. Our privilege is great, but Mary’s privilege is hard to fathom. God Himself came down to earth, entered Mary’s womb, and was born in King David’s hometown of Bethlehem. No wonder Mary told her cousin Elizabeth that the Mighty One had done great things for her and that all generations would count her blessed (Luke 1:46-55).
I am grateful for the celebration of Christmas all around me with its reminders of what God began that day in royal David’s city — for you and me, for everyone we love, and for everyone in the history and the future of the world.
Have this attitude in yourselves
which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, although He existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant,
and being made in the likeness of men.
Being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled Himself by becoming obedient
to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8