Here’s the perfect birthday present for Jesus …

It’s Christmas time, soon it will be the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ!

So what are you giving Jesus for His birthday?

You may chuckle at that question and then immediately dismiss it because for many of us, Jesus doesn’t have nearly as much to do with the holiday as we do. We’ve made the celebration of Christmas mostly about the receiving of gifts for ourselves than giving anything to the One who is having the birthday.

Some time after His birth, some wise men came to celebrate the birth of Jesus and they marked the occasion by worshiping Him and giving Him gifts …

“They entered the house and saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasure chests and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” Matthew 2:11.

Those wise men were liberal with their gift-giving!

When it comes to giving to Jesus, we’re more like the little girl whose mother wanted to teach her a moral lesson. She gave her daughter a quarter, plus a dollar for church, and then told her, “Put whichever one you want in the offering plate and keep the other for yourself.”

When they were coming out of church, the mother asked her daughter which amount she had given.

“Well,” answered the little girl, “I was going to give the dollar, but just before the offering the man behind the pulpit said that we should all be cheerful givers. I knew I’d be a lot more cheerful if I gave the quarter, so I did.”

Like that little girl, we’re more cheerful about giving less to Jesus and giving more to ourselves. We’re even that way at Christmas time, a time when God gave His greatest treasure — His only Son — as the greatest gift we’ll ever receive.

So maybe we shouldn’t laugh about and dismiss the idea of giving something to Jesus. And not something cheap either.

Hey, I’ve got an idea!

What if we gave to Jesus for His birthday everything we haven’t yet given Him?

As Christians, our lives are supposed to be completely surrendered to Jesus Christ. But in the giving of our lives in surrender to Him, we’ve been cheap in our giving, haven’t we? Most of us have held out some things so we could be more “cheerful” about our surrender.

Maybe we haven’t given Him our whole hearts, our entire devotion.

Maybe we haven’t given Him the time He deserves.

Most of us still have a tight grasp on our money, maybe we need to give that to Him to be spent in a ways that would glorify Him and fit His will for us.

Most of us love someone — a spouse, children, family, even a pet — more than we love the God who made us. Maybe we could give Him the love He deserves.

Giving a gift to Jesus for His birthday doesn’t involve a lot of thinking and searching trying to pick out just the right gift. The right gift is simply to give to Him everything we haven’t yet given to Him.

I think that just might be the perfect birthday present for Jesus, especially if we give it cheerfully!

Scotty