Why Christmas Gift Exchanges Can’t Be Our Theology

Image by Bob Dmyt from Pixabay

Every year we exchange gifts with loved ones. We buy gifts for people who buy gifts for us. The annual tradition of the Christmas gift exchange is a larger, more formal version of all the ways we show kindness to one another throughout the year. It’s a win-win arrangement of reciprocating favors that strengthens and deepens our relationships with people who are important to us.

But that tradition of exchanging kindnesses that is so healthy in human relationships is actually toxic in our relationship with God. Why? Because He is not just another human; He is the Holy One of Israel, and it is foolish to imagine that we could be in the kind of relationship with God that is defined by the exchanging of favors.

Because God already sees me through the lens of the righteousness of His Son, there’s nothing I can do to make Him love me more… or make Him love me less. Jesus has already put me in a better position with God than I could ever hope to gain by my own efforts. God the Father, who looked on as His Son was baptized, pronounced His verdict: “This is My Beloved Son. In him am I well pleased.”

As uncomfortable as it makes me to say it, that is precisely what God sees when he looks at me. He doesn’t see my self-righteousness, my sloth, my self-absorption, my lust, my vanity. What He sees when He looks at me is the zeal, selflessness, purity, and humility of His Son; as a result, because of Jesus, the Holy One of Israel is well-pleased with what He sees in me.

I didn’t always understand this. I grew up thinking that I was saved by grace, but I had to maintain my salvation by my works. I even remember hearing the doctrine of eternal salvation being explained in what I now see as a caricature: “’Once saved, always saved’ means that once you’re saved, you can live however you want.” I knew that couldn’t be true, so I threw out the baby with the bathwater and assumed that my salvation somehow depends on my continued good performance.

But it occurred to me the other day that the misrepresentation I had heard was partly true. Once Christ has saved me, I can live however I want without jeopardizing my standing before God. Jesus’s death and resurrection have ensured that my position as God’s child will never change, regardless of how I behave.

It’s just that now that I am a new creature in Christ, my desires have begun to shift. Of course I still have the same old desires and temptations to sin, but now that I belong to Jesus, now that the Spirit has undertaken His gracious sanctifying work, it is literally inconceivable that I could ever be comfortable living in rebellion against my Father.

But if my behavior can’t change my standing before God, why should I bother doing what is right? Why bother with helping my neighbor or being generous with a suffering brother or telling the truth even when it hurts? After all, God’s opinion of me won’t change regardless of whether I’m helpful or disengaged, whether I’m generous or stingy, whether I’m honest or shady. He still sees the sterling righteousness of Jesus in me no matter how I behave.

I obey my Father not out of a desire to exchange favors with Him but out of sheer gratitude for what He’s done for me.

Standing in the grace that God has shown me in Christ, I can’t reciprocate in kind, I can’t give back to God in proportion to what He has given me. But I can express my profound gratitude. I can begin now, in this life, to do what I will do forever in the next: live a life of holy gratitude.

We “exchange” gifts at Christmas, but with what God has given us in Christ, there is no “exchanging” gifts with God, no way to return to Him anything like what He has so graciously given us. We are the rebels invited to sit at the table of the King, and not as guests but as adopted sons and daughters.

Because of the Gospel, because of what God has given me in Christ, I am free to lay aside my schemes for earning His approval, and I can respond to Him freely, out of a heart of gratitude, no longer out of guilt.

This is why the Gospel, the story of God’s gift of His Son, is such very good news. In Jesus, God has given us a gift that we cannot regard as an exchange; all we can so is fall at His feet in gratitude and wonder at His grace.

May the High King of Heaven bless you and yours this Christmas as we remember once again how He changed the trajectory of history – the history of the world, the history of our families, our own personal histories – in the birth of that peasant woman’s first son in Bethlehem.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship