Perhaps you’ve been involved in a “White Elephant” gift exchange. I’ve found them to be quite an educational experience. The purpose of the exercise is to scavenge through your home to find an item that you no longer need or have use for, elegantly wrap it so as to entice some other unsuspecting person into believing that it is a gift of incredible worth. In some contexts the same gift makes its way through a given group for several consecutive years. People actually do unto others as was done unto them – pass on a useless gift!

Giving gifts at Christmas is always a costly endeavor and the cost is more than just monetary. It costs us our time as we frequent one mall after another. We expend significant amounts of physical and emotional energy in our pursuit of the perfect gift! Sometimes it costs us our sleep as we lay awake fretting about the whole exercise, wishing it would pass more quickly than it does. Have you ever thought about the “cost” of Christmas, the “cost of being a committed Christ-follower? Allow these “cost” realities to stimulate your thinking:

• It cost Mary and Joseph the comforts of home during a long period of exile in Egypt to protect the little babe.
• It cost mothers in and around Bethlehem the massacre of their babies by the cruel order of Herod.
• It cost the shepherds the complacency of their shepherd’s life, with the call to visit the manger and then tell the good news.
• It cost the wise men a long journey, expensive gifts and changed lives.
• It cost the early Apostles and the early church persecution and sometimes death.
• It has cost missionaries of Christ untold suffering and deprivation to spread the Good News.
• It has cost Christian martyrs in all ages their lives for Christ’s sake.
• More than all this, it cost God the Father His own Son—He sent Him to the earth to save humankind.
• It cost Jesus a life of sacrifice and service, a cruel death unmatched in history.

As I reflect on the cost of Christmas I am reminded at how often we settle for giving so much less than our best. Sometimes, we offer a “White Elephant” type of gift. We might wrap it up in elegant wrapping paper seeking somehow to fool Him into thinking it’s something of value. But we must remember that it’s not the quality of the wrapping that determines the quality of the gift.

God spared nothing in giving us the gift of His son whose birth we celebrate at Christmas. It was the gift to beat all gifts! Might His willingness to pay that “cost” inspire us to give Him our best not only this Christmas, but throughout the year.