Category: Incarnation (Page 1 of 10)

Opened from the Outside

We can’t save ourselves, have you noticed? We’ve been trying for centuries. We are completely unable to save ourselves. In fact, believing we can somehow save ourselves has only led us into deeper darkness and loss. The forgiveness we desire, the acceptance we chase, the restoration we crave, the salvation we need only comes through God in Christ. It can only come from outside us as a gift.

On November 21, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter from Tegel prison. He was being held by the Nazis for his opposition to Hitler and for running an illegal underground seminary. In the middle of the letter, Bonhoeffer writes:

“Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent–one waits and hopes and potters about but, in the end, what we do is of little consequence, for the door is shut. And it can only be opened from the outside.”

For God so loved the world that he OPENED the door! For God so loved the world that he GAVE his one and only Son! God SENT his only Son for us as a gracious gift of his limitless love!

May we receive God’s gift of great joy to us. May we experience God’s presence with us. And may our hearts be changed so that God’s life is our life. Today and every day until our Lord Jesus comes again.

Peace,

Allan

 

God Gets You

If God really has been born in a manger in Bethlehem, then we have something no other religion in world history has ever claimed. We belong to a God who truly and totally understands you. He gets you, from the inside of your experience. There’s no other religion that says God has suffered, that God had to be courageous, that God knows what it’s like to be abandoned by his friends, to be crushed by injustice, to be tortured and to die. Christmas shows us that God knows exactly what you’re going through. When you talk to God in Christ, yes, he totally understands.

Dorothy Sayers, a contemporary of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, wrote this in the 1950s:

“The Incarnation means that God himself has gone through the whole of human experience–from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. He was born in poverty and suffered infinite pain–all for us–and thought it well worth his while.”

God taking on our everyday human condition is the means of our salvation. God reclaims us as his own by becoming one of us. That is good news of great joy for all of us. For you.

God joins you in the middle of your mess in order to save you. No one is so lost or so broken, YOU are not so far gone or so messed up that you are beyond God’s reach. Our God specializes in the mess. And I don’t care how messy your mess is, it doesn’t phase our God one bit. I don’t care how small or insignificant or unworthy you feel, you are exactly the one God came for.

God chose to be born in a manger and to come from Nazareth. Can anything good come from Nazareth? Exactly! That’s the whole point!

This is how our God works. God brings his salvation to the ends of the earth not through the Egyptians or Romans, not through the Assyrians or Babylonians, but through Israel. He tells us he chose Israel because they are small and weak. God destroys Goliath, not with a bigger giant, but with a smaller shepherd boy the giant was laughing at. That’s the way God works. How does God speak to Elijah? Not through the earthquake or the wind or the fire, but through a small, still voice. A whisper. God works through Isaac, not Ishmael. He works through Jacob, not Esau. God works through Joseph and David, not their older brothers. God chooses old broken down Sarah, not young vibrant Hagar. He chooses unattractive Leah, not beautiful Rachel. He chooses Rebekah, who can’t have children. He chooses Hannah, who can’t have children. He chooses Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, who can’t have children.

Why?

Over and over again our God says, “I will choose Nazareth over Jerusalem. I will choose the girl nobody wants. I will choose the boy everyone’s forgotten.”

Why? Because God just likes the underdog?

No. Because God is telling us something about salvation itself. Every other religion and moral philosophy in history tells you to summon up your strength and willpower and try real hard to live like you’re supposed to. That appeals to the strong. That appeals to gifted and talented people, people who are privileged, people who are able to pull it all together. Jesus is the only one who says, “I have come for the weak. I have come for those who admit they’re weak. I will save them not by what they do, but by what I do.”

Can anything good come from __________? Fill in the blank with your own mess, your own situation, your own failure. Go ahead. What is your shortcoming, your burden, your sin, your circumstance? Can anything good come from there?

If you repent and come to God through Jesus, not only will God accept you and work in you and through you, but he absolutely delights to work in and through people just like you. He’s been doing it through all of world history.

I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been gone or how far away you are. It doesn’t matter how dark it is or how bad. Christ Jesus is all in. He’s all in with you and he’s all in for you. He knows all about you and your past failures and your present situation. He knows. And he’s still all in.

That’s the best news you’ve ever heard.

Peace,

Allan

Best. News. Ever.

If God really was born in a manger in Bethlehem, then we have something no other religion in the world has ever claimed. God became a human being. God himself, the Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth, has become one with us by becoming one of us. The best news in the whole world is that God and us are brought together in Jesus. In fact, God taking on our everyday human condition is the means of our salvation. God reclaims us as his own by becoming one of us. That’s the best news ever!

But a lot of us are missing it.

I saw a survey early last week from 2022 that showed 43% of U.S. Christians agree with this statement: “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”

How can that be? That’s impossible! Unless Jesus is both 100% fully God and 100% fully human at the same time, the Gospel is powerless to save. The Good News is just an empty announcement.

Think about, in the Bible, how people responded to Jesus. It’s mostly over-the-top extreme reactions. Nobody was ever just “meh” about Jesus. Some are so furious with him they try to throw him off a cliff. Others are so terrified they cry out, “Go away from me!” Others fall down before him and worship. Why all the extremes?

Because if Jesus is God, then you have to change and center your entire life around him. If he is not God, then he is someone to hate or fear. No other response makes any sense; it can only be one of the two extremes. Either Jesus is God or he’s not. So he’s either absolutely crazy and dangerous or he’s infinitely wonderful and good.

But our world is filled with people who say they believe in Jesus, they say they understand who he is, but it hasn’t revolutionized their lives. There’s no change. They still look and think and act like everybody else. The only way to explain this is that, contrary to what they claim, they haven’t really understood the meaning of Immanuel, that Jesus Christ is God with us.

The Advent of Christ, the arrival of Jesus changes everything. If anyone is in Christ, there is new creation! The old has gone, the new has come! Ezekiel says we’re given a new heart and a new spirit. Romans 12 says we’re given a new mind. Jesus tells us we’re given a new identity and a new family in him. And at the end of Matthew 19, Jesus gives us the hope of living in a brand new world, what he calls the renewal of all things!

Something has happened. Something has been done. And it totally changes everything. It’s the best news you’ve ever heard. And it gives you and it gives all of us a whole new world.

Peace,

Allan

The Second Incarnation

Jesus is the incarnation of God. Incarnation just means flesh and blood. The Gospel of John says the Word of God – the will of God, who God is and what God wants for the world – became flesh and blood in Jesus so we could see it and know it. In his own words, Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” You see it and you know it. You get it because you’ve experienced it in me.

The Church is the second incarnation. And, yes, we are mostly a mess. We’re just like the people Jesus called to follow him, just like the people he surrounded himself with: ordinary fishermen and business people, blind people, loose women, weak men, liars and cheaters and cowards. And people who’ve been hurt. All of us have been injured. We’re all wounded and put back together with duct tape and twistie ties. And grace.

Grace that in Christ we are God’s chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. It’s a great mystery, but for some reason the Church is the way Jesus has chosen to be real and present in the world. He lives in us and through us by his Spirit. His heart beats in our chests, his eyes see through ours; when we speak, his voice is heard; and his welcome is felt in our embrace. We are the flesh and blood Body of Christ.

When people see the Church, they expect to experience God. When Jesus says, “You give them something to eat,” he’s talking to you. He’s talking to us.

Peace,

Allan

The Flesh and Blood Church

You’ll hear people argue that when Jesus called people to follow him, he had something else in mind other than Church. Something spiritual and pure. Non-corporate. Non-institutional. Lofty. Divine. Not of this earth. The Church, as we experience her today, is not what Jesus intended. Christ’s salvation and transformation work is happening somewhere other than at Church.

No. Jesus is a flesh and blood person and his Church is a flesh and blood people.

That’s the beauty and the glory of our salvation: our God didn’t just come to us, he became one of us! That’s God’s salvation plan, that he would put on our flesh and blood. And when Jesus comes, it’s the messy flesh and blood part of it that’s so compelling.

As you read the Gospels, you can almost taste the dust. You can smell the animals. You can hear the people arguing. Jesus is not so much about inspiring concepts and uplifting ideals, he’s about fishing nets and mustard seeds and lost coins and lepers. Our Lord is more about tears and frustration and spit mixed with dirt and sheep and synagogues and sermons and suppers than he is about theological abstracts and disembodied ideas. Jesus is all about weddings and funerals, betrayal and forgiveness, thunderstorms and olive trees. The flesh and blood reality of Jesus as a real human person is in your face in the Bible.

And it’s beautiful! It’s magnificent! We praise God because he became one of us in Jesus Christ. Our eternal salvation is grounded in the fact that Jesus is a flesh and blood person, that he experienced everything you experience, that he knows you intimately and understands completely what you’re going through because he went through it, too. It’s awesome and mysterious and wonderfully glorious! What other God would do that?

Jesus the Christ, the Holy One of God, is a flesh and blood person. So, of course, his Church is a flesh and blood people.

I think churches long to throw off their flesh and blood nature and soar like Superman. Or supersaints. But that’s not going to happen. We’re a body. When people complain about the Church being too preoccupied with money or buildings or doctrine or prestige, when people gripe about the Church being closed-minded or boring, what they’re telling you is that they don’t like that the Church is a body. Bodies sweat. They get sick and require maintenance. Bodies produce weird smells.

But the Church is the Body of Christ. This is the flesh and blood form our risen and reigning Lord has chosen to be present in the world. It never fully meets our expectations; we can become disappointed in Church, or even embarrassed. But this is exactly how our God intends it.

Church is not another civic club or social organization, it’s not a non-profit charity or a spiritual retreat. We are a chosen people, a holy nation, chosen by a holy God to be the Body of Christ. Sometimes it may feel irrelevant or past its prime, but we are the very Body of Christ. This is how our God works for the sake of the world.

Peace,

Allan

Joyful in Our Salvation

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned. You have enlarged the nation and increased their joy; they rejoice before you!” ~ Isaiah 9:2-3

In Isaiah 9, God is speaking through his prophet to a people who have trusted in their own power instead of the Lord’s. They’ve rejected God and his ways. In their own pursuits of power and pleasure, wealth and success, they’ve turned their backs on God and his will for his children. Instead of having the canopy of God’s protection over them, instead of being guided by the pillar of cloud and fire, they are living in darkness. They are in bondage to the Assyrians. They’re destitute. In distress. The very nations they have trusted for protection have now imprisoned them. They’ve been plunged into deep darkness. The land of the valley of the shadow of death kind of darkness.

And the Father in Heaven, our God, the eternal Creator of Heaven and Earth, looks down with compassion on his burdened children and says, “I will not leave them in the darkness.”

In the very places where the Assyrians conquered them, in the very location where the death and destruction began, God says, a new light will dawn. For these people walking in darkness, I will send this great light.

And as a result of God’s gracious intervention, because of God’s generous and merciful act, the people will rejoice.

God’s people will experience great joy and they will rejoice just like farmers after a record-breaking harvest. They will rejoice just like the soldiers after VE Day. The people will rejoice as if a loved one had been raised from the dead, like a Powerball Lottery winner, like a Hail Mary touchdown pass to win the Super Bowl! The people will rejoice!

The yoke will be shattered. The burden will be lifted. The enemy’s tools and weapons will be destroyed. Bright light will shine into the darkness. Victory will come from defeat. Life will spring from death. And the people will rejoice!

When? When is this going to happen? And how? How is God going to accomplish this?

“For to us a child is born. To us a Son is given.” ~Isaiah 9:6

God accomplishes the salvation of the world in the birth of a baby. Immanuel. God with us.

AllĀ  of your fears, all of your pains, all of your sins and your brokenness — it’s all met head-on in Jesus Christ and dealt with forever. All your hopes and dreams, everything you know as right and good and true, all your deepest longings — they are all found in Jesus and delivered to you forever. God has been born to us, he has come to us. He made himself subject to all our pain and suffering in order to bring healing and comfort. He became open to loss while he is mighty to save. He is vulnerable to death in order to give eternal life. He walks in your darkness — he walks through your darkness with you — and shines his salvation light.

It is through this Christ, this promised Savior, that God personally gets involved in your situation and fixes it. He enters your mess and makes things right. God in the flesh comes to this earth, in the very place where your brokenness and sickness and sin took over your life and wrecked everything — that’s where the new light dawns! Jesus brings right into your circumstances the eternal Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of everlasting peace, of which there will be no end.

Jesus is born in Bethlehem and the light shines in the darkness. God himself walks our streets and touches our people, he hugs our kids and eats with us and loves us. Distressed people are encouraged when they meet Jesus. Hopeless people are given hope when they encounter this Lord. Prisoners are released, outcasts are brought in, cold people are warmed, hungry people are fed, sick people are made well, sinful people are forgiven, the weak are given power and the tired are made to soar on the wings of eagles! The devil’s grip on God’s people is broken forever! Sin and death and Satan and all the things that work around the clock to separate us from God and from one another are eternally destroyed! That’s the Son of God! That’s our Savior!

To us a child is born! And the people rejoice! They can’t help it!

May we all be joyful in our salvation.

Peace,

Allan

« Older posts