Having said that every birth is special, what’s so special about the birth of Jesus that we remember His birthday every year?
When a member of the royal family has a baby, there’s usually a lot of interest in the event, far beyond the ties of family and blood. When a baby is born to a ‘celebrity’, there is similarly a lot of attention given because of who the child’s parents are. The birth of Jesus is special because His birth is unique. He was not conceived in the usual way, through the sexual union of a man and a woman. An angel appeared to Mary, who was a virgin, and told her she would conceive and have a baby, which astounded her since she definitely knew the facts of life! When she asked how this could be, she was told, ‘The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.’ (Luke 1:35)
The birth of Jesus is special because He is both God and man. It is this which makes Him uniquely able to save us, because He was born without sin. All of us do wrong things and disobey God, just as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, but Jesus, because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, was without sin and therefore could stand in the gap between all humanity and God. The ‘virgin birth’ is absolutely essential to God’s plan of salvation and was something He spoke about hundreds of years prior to it happening (‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.’ Isaiah 7:14) We can’t ever fully understand this or explain it, but we can be very grateful for this miracle which paves the way for our salvation.
