HeartFelt Kids Bible

The ruler had said that everybody must go back to the town their family came from, so Mary and Joseph set out for Bethlehem. It was a long, dusty, uphill road and it took them days. Mary was going to have her baby at any moment, and there was nothing to do but keep walking.

Bethlehem was packed. Everybody else had come back too, and every house and every inn was already crowded. Joseph knocked on door after door, and door after door, the answer was the same. No room. It was getting dark and it was getting cold and Mary could not walk much further.

Then one man looked at Mary and thought again. He did not have a room, but he had a stable round the back where the animals were kept, and it was dry and it was warm. It was not much. It was what he had, and he gave it, and that is why we still tell this part.

That night, among the sleepy animals and the smell of clean straw, Mary's baby was born. She wrapped him up snugly and laid him in the manger, the wooden box the animals eat from, because there was no cradle anywhere. And the King of everything spent his first night in a feeding trough.

Out on the dark hillside some shepherds were sitting up with their sheep, the way they did every night of their lives. Then the whole sky lit up and an angel was standing there, and they were terrified. Do not be afraid, the angel said. I have good news, and it is for everybody. Today a Saviour has been born.

The shepherds did not wait for morning. They ran the whole way down into Bethlehem and found the stable and the manger and the baby, exactly as they had been told. And these rough, ordinary, working men knelt down in the straw. Out of everybody in the world, God told them first.