We are all very different people who like to give and receive different kinds of gifts. But though you may be giving and receiving everything from sledge hammers to soup bowls this Christmas, I’ve noticed that there is one thing all our varied gifts tend to share in common—the condition of the gift.

Your gift might be anything from a paintball gun to a pasta maker, but the thing that most of us share in common is that we like our gifts to be new, and we like them to work.

And that makes perfect sense to me. My guess is that if your Christmas gift is used and broken, you probably won't be super happy about that.

And while it’s a pretty straight-forward fact that most of us like our Christmas gifts to be new and we like our Christmas gifts to work, it’s also very interesting to me because, though we are all very much like each other in that regard, we are very different than Jesus.