"This Baby" by Steven Curtis Chapman (1995)

The strength of Steven Curtis Chapman’s “This Baby” is the way he refuses to let the incarnation drift into abstraction. Many Christmas tunes paint the birth of Jesus in soft focus, wrapped in sentiment and sanitized imagery. But Chapman insists on the concrete, earthy, utterly human reality of the infant Christ.

“This Baby” is, on the surface, a simple song. It tells the story of Jesus’ birth by emphasizing the most normal, everyday aspects of infancy. His crying, his hunger, his tiny hands and feet, his absolute dependence. But that simplicity is the song’s theological genius. In each verse, Chapman quietly dismantles both the overly sentimental Christmas myth and the overly spiritualized Christianity that forgets the startling, bodily reality of God becoming flesh.

The repetition of the phrase “this baby” functions like a refrain of insistence. Not “this idea of hope,” not “this spiritual symbol,” but this baby, a real child, born into sweat and tears and straw. Chapman is reminding us of something the early church fought hard to defend: Jesus did not merely appear human. He was human. Fully. Painfully. Vulnerably.

Our culture, shaped by expressive individualism, often wants a Christ who fits neatly into our private emotional world, a personalized “spiritual Jesus” who serves as a lifestyle accessory, helpful for coping, comforting for our anxieties, supportive of whatever version of the self we are currently crafting. But “This Baby” confronts us with a Christ who refuses to stay in the realm of abstraction.

You cannot sentimentalize a baby who keeps you up at night.

You cannot privatize a baby who cries and soils his swaddling clothes.

You cannot bend to your will a baby who must be carried, fed, and protected.

Chapman brings us face-to-face with the staggering humility of Philippians 2: that the eternal Son “emptied himself… being born in human likeness.” He did not simply visit humanity; he entered its smallest and weakest form.

And in doing so, he dignified our humanity.

He affirmed the goodness of creation.

He showed that redemption begins not by helping us ascend to godlike autonomy, but by God descending into our ordinariness.

It is also no accident that Chapman contrasts the normalcy of Christ’s infancy with the extraordinary mission he came to fulfill. The one who needed his mother’s milk would one day call Himself the Bread of Life. The one whose tiny fingers grasped Joseph’s hand would one day stretch out those hands to heal, to bless, and ultimately to be pierced for our sins. The one who needed to be carried would one day carry the cross. The one who cried in the night would one day conquer death itself.

But Chapman refuses to rush to the grand finale. He wants us to linger at the manger long enough to regain our awe. Because if we skip the humanity, we distort the gospel. A Christianity that forgets the real flesh of Christ quickly becomes a disembodied spirituality, focused on feelings rather than truth, on private experience rather than public faithfulness, on personal comfort rather than costly discipleship.

“This Baby” is an antidote to that forgetfulness. It calls us back to the staggering truth that God did not save us from afar. He stepped into our world, our bodies, our limitations. He did not merely preach compassion; He cried as an infant. He did not merely teach humility; He lived it from His first breath.

And in this world where so many of us are tempted to retreat into curated identities, online self-presentations, and hyper-individualized spirituality Chapman reminds us that salvation comes not through self-invention but through God’s incarnation. We needed more than inspiration.

We needed more than a message.

We needed this baby, the one who grew up to be our Savior.