The accomplishment of redemption required that the Son of God take a human body – which He willingly did and rejoiced to do so!  This, I think, is often undervalued – a believer’s interest in the body of the Lord Jesus.  The 19th-century Scottish pastor Hugh Martin has provided edifying insights into the wonder of Christ’s bodily human nature.

What wondrous love to his father! What wondrous love to us! And how do we receive, or reply to, his love! Shall he welcome so joyfully that body in which he was to be wounded, and wearied, and grieved, and bruised, and crucified, and buried? And shall not we welcome him in that body in which he suffers all this for us? Is our flesh so dear to him that he rejoices to receive the body prepared for him? and when he thus presents to us the fullness of his Godhead, joyfully sojourning among us in our flesh, even though the penalty of doing so be the burden of our sin, and the sting of our death, and the battle with our foes, and the curse of our God, shall we not give him joyful welcome, even when the issue of our doing so is, deliverance from the curse and from death, and from Satan and from sin? Surely this body is prepared for us as much as for him.  He bore our sins in his own body on the tree. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. And shall we leave it to him alone to welcome this body in which our redemption is to be accomplished? Nay, we join with him in rejoicing at his birth. (Emphasis added. Christ victorious, Voices at Bethlehem, pp. 5-6)

How precious is our Christ, in His complete person! May this season draw us to Him to see all that He did, even His coming in the flesh, is for His people. Child of God, rejoice!