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Category: Incarnation (Page 5 of 9)

Incarnation Revelation

December 22, 2015 / / 0 Comments

JesusBirthThe Incarnation is a remarkable and powerful thing: God chose to come into this world the same way all of us come into the world — through the pain and water and blood of human birth. Just like you and me, God was born. God came here as a baby. The Gospel of John says the Word — the creative Word of God, the creation power of God — became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

God with us. Immanuel. He came to us. God came here to live with and to bless his creation. And it’s not just a beautiful idea or an abstract theological truth. It really happened on that clear starry night in Bethlehem.

But what do we do with this? We rejoice and we express thanksgiving, yes. We join heaven and earth in praise and worship, absolutely. But we don’t really understand it. God Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, coming to this world as a helpless baby — that blows our minds. We don’t really have a category for that.

So, usually, we kind of chop Jesus up. Fully human and fully God, we don’t know what that means. So we say everything in the Bible about Jesus’ weakness and pain and suffering points to his humanity, and everything in Scripture about his wisdom and power and authority points to his divinity. But if that’s the case, the coming of Jesus doesn’t really tell us anything new. It’s nothing to sing about. We don’t need Jesus to tell us that God is big and powerful and strong and that human beings are little and weak and powerless. We already know that. We already believe the relationship between God and humans is about above and below, about superior to inferior, about master to servant. We already believe that.

Well, that’s not what the baby Jesus is about. Immanuel, God with us, is about the shocking reversal of everything we believe about heaven and earth. It’s not about big God and little humans. It’s not about the Creator asserting his divine greatness and power in contrast to human weakness. This is about God becoming weak and powerless so that humans can become affirmed and exalted. It’s about God lowering himself so his creation can be lifted up.

Irenaeus, in the second century, wrote: “Jesus Christ in his infinite love has become what we are in order that he may make us entirely what he is.”

Jesus prays to his Father the night before his death, “I have given them the same glory that you gave me!”

JesusBabyAdorationGod did not create heaven and earth to get joy or to receive love. He created in order to share his joy and love. Yes, all of creation is an explosion of God’ glory. All of heaven and nature point us to God’s goodness and beauty, his power and love. But he didn’t do it so we would believe in him. He doesn’t do it for our inspiration or spirituality. He does it because he wants to share his joy and love.

So he comes to us in Jesus. He joins us as a baby. He shows us in the birth of the Christ that his Kingdom is not founded on bloodlines or race or nationality or money. His nature is not about power or strength or violence or war. God’s character, what he’s all about, is grace. He and his Kingdom come to us as a gift of his amazing grace.

“He came to that which was his own… To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, or a husband’s will, but born of God.” ~John 1:11-13

We’re not born into the Kingdom like we have some special birthright or like we’re entitled in some way. We’re adopted into the Kingdom. We are given our eternal rights and blessings by grace. It’s a gift. Jesus was the Son of Mary by faith, yes, and by water and blood. But first, he was her son by divine grace.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” ~John 1:14

The King of the World has come. And he’s not like any king this world has ever seen. What sets him apart from other kings and what sets his subjects apart from other people is not his strength, but his weakness like us; not his majestic power, but his suffering with us; not his eternal authority and rule, but his obedience and suffering for us.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King! Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing!

Peace,

Allan

Anticipation

December 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

“My eyes have seen your salvation!” ~Luke 2:30

Simeon and Anna were both at the temple in Jerusalem that day Joseph and Mary brought their six-weeks-old baby boy to the priests for dedication. Scripture tells us that Simeon was “waiting for the consolation of Israel” and that Anna and others with her were “looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.” And when they gazed upon the infant Jesus, they saw the Lord’s salvation. They were looking at a baby, but they saw the glorious fulfillment of God’s promises. They saw it!

Israel was being brought back together as God’s united people because of Jesus. The powerful would be humbled and the lowly would be raised because of Jesus. Evil was being defeated and the captives were being set free because of Jesus. God had always promised to comfort and console his people; to protect and provide for his people; to rescue and restore his people. Simeon and Anna both saw how all those eternal pledges were finally coming true in Jesus. And not just for Israel, but for the whole world!

Simeon is looking at a baby; but he sees salvation from God.

Anna is gazing at an infant; but she sees deliverance from God.

You know why they saw it? You know why they recognized it? Because they were looking forward to it! They were waiting for it, watching for it, expecting it, anticipating it. They were laying awake every night like little kids on Christmas Eve: can’t sleep, can’t wait, all I think about, hurry up and get here!

What is it you’re waiting for like that because of Jesus? What are you looking for? What are you expecting because of Jesus? What do you see?

Fifty years ago everybody was looking at a couple of missionaries in Brazil. But a few of God’s saints saw Great Cities Missions and dozens and dozens of teams of gospel proclaimers preaching the Word and planting churches and baptizing and making disciples in the largest capitol cities all over the Latin world. Because of Jesus. They anticipated it because of Jesus. They expected it.

We gaze at Ellwood park across the street here at Central and we know it as a place for drug dealers and prostitutes and crime. Well, some of us are going to have to see a place where the hungry are fed, where the discouraged are lifted up, where bridges are built and community is forged and where God draws people to himself to the glory of his great name. Because of Jesus. We have to anticipate it. We have to look forward to it.

We look at the Madison Apartments and we know it as an eyesore, a slum, a dilapidated and dangerous cluster of buildings that represent the darkness and desperation of our church’s neighborhood. We know it as something that needs to be mowed down by a bulldozer and leveled. But we’ve bought those apartments. We own them. Because there’s a growing number of saints in our church who actually see the largest branch of this city’s first ever free medical clinic operating in those buildings. We anticipate doctors and nurses and dentists providing health care at no charge; we see God’s people singing and praying and celebrating with men and women and children who’ve never had any health care before; we expect folks in our neighborhood to experience the love and grace of our God maybe for the first time in their lives. Because of Jesus.

I look at the Central Church of Christ and I know us as a terrific group of warm and friendly God-fearing people with an excellent reputation in our community for wanting to help others. But I see something more. I see a group of 700 followers of Jesus; all of us committed to discipleship; dedicated to giving every part of our lives to God; focused on transformation and the hard changes it demands. I anticipate all of us to be totally sold out to God’s salvation mission so that we all have our own ministries, our own mission points, taking God’s gospel to the bankers and lawyers in the southwest part of town, proclaiming the good news at the parks and ball fields on the east side of town, spreading God’s mercy and grace in the medical district, sacrificing and serving in his name at the schools and shelters downtown, purposefully taking God’s love to the coffee shop in Pampa and the Supercuts in Canyon. I see it. I’m expecting it. All of us. Eventually turning our whole community upside down as salvation from God reaches every single corner of the panhandle. Because of Jesus.

What are you looking for? What are you anticipating because of Jesus?

Can you see the darkness in your circumstance eventually turned to light because of Jesus? Can you see the despair of your situation eventually turning to joy because of Jesus? Can you see the mundane aspects of your life eventually being filled with excitement and purpose for God and his salvation mission?

Simeon and Anna were looking at a baby. But they saw the promised salvation from God.

Yes, our God can sometimes seem slow. We might even say God is slow as Christmas. But he will fulfill all his promises to you and to his people and to the whole world. Our God is faithful and he will keep his Word. And he left his home in glory and came here to us one clear and starry night in a manger in Bethlehem, as a baby, as a human baby, so we could see.

Peace,

Allan

Not That We Loved God…

November 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” ~1 John 4:10

Jesus is not just a messenger or an ambassador sent from God to the earth. Jesus is actually God in the flesh! Through his Christ, God actually joins us and lives with us on this planet. He’s not just standing a long way off and announcing the way of salvation through a representative. God actually became a man!

And we see in this “Emmanuel,” this “God with us,” our Lord’s deep desire for community. We see his longing for eternal relationship and communion with his people. And we experience our God’s love.

Jesus, in essence, says, “I am God.” Look at me. When you see me, you see the Father. When you know me, you know the Father.

Jesus reveals God. Jesus allows us to see God, to experience God. His compassion shows us God’s compassion; his gentleness shows us God’s gentleness; His mercy shows us God’s mercy; Jesus’ forgiveness shows us God’s forgiveness. And his death on the cross reveals very clearly to us the depth of God’s great love.

If God so loved the world, that means he loves you, too. And it’s that deep love for you that motivates his every action. There’s nothing our God does that is not compelled by his love for you. There’s nothing he allows to happen to you that is not driven by his foremost goal of living in eternal communion with you.

God loves you. Forever.

Peace,

Allan

Out of Control

June 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Another reflection or two based on Stanley Hauerwas’ latest book, “Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life.”

One of Hauerwas’ favorite lines goes something like this: “Being a Christian means undergoing the training necessary to know how to live out of control.” We do live under the illusions that we are mostly in control of what happens to us and around us. Especially here in the United States, we like to think that very little is out of our control. And, that flies in the face of our Christian theology, yes? We follow a Lord who gave up all control, who put on the shelf every bit of status and power, who emptied himself of all mastery and prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done.”

And he taught us to pray and to live in that same way.

Hauerwas makes the point in one of the last essays in this latest collection that sickness is one way God trains us to rely on him.

Because of the staggering advances in technology and modern medicine, our approach to sickness sometimes betrays an attitude about sickness that might be close to the same attitude non-Christians have about sickness. (Go ahead and read that sentence again if you need to. Sorry.) Sometimes the God we pray to when we are sick is only a “god of the gaps.” He’s the “middle-man” between us and the doctors and experts, the MRIs and CT Scans, that do the real job of healing. Praying to God that way makes him to be a deistic God whose existence is not much more than an insurance policy for us against disaster. But a god like that is not the God who came to us in the flesh and suffered with us in pain and death.

The God we worship taught us to pray, “Not my will, but yours be done.” We’re all going to get sick. We’re all going to suffer in this life. We’re all going to get hurt, to get disappointed, to get injured, and die. But those are not the kinds of things that fuel our prayers. Our prayers should be motivated by the eternal and right-now presence of God. Hauerwas writes:

“The story that determines the Christian body is the story of Emmanuel, God with us. This is the story we were baptized into, which means we have already died. Therefore, the hope we share is ultimately not a hope to get through life unscathed, but a hope to remain faithful until the end. It is the hope of the resurrection.”

“Illness usually comes as an unexpected guest, threatening to disorder our routines and make our lives incoherent. The stories that constitute our lives are meant to give us a sense of control and to assure us that we know where we are and in what time we live. Yet the stories that we may actually be living may not be the ones we think we are living, but our illusions are dear to us. Illness often destroys our illusions as well as our confidence that we are in control.”

When we get sick, we realize that we are not in control. We acknowledge that God is in control and we lean on him more. We depend on God to sustain us, to give us life, to bless us with breath. When we’re sick, we need God. We recognize our powerlessness and our inabilities to fix the situation. We’re reminded that we are out of control and that we really, really need God.

And isn’t that where God wants you?

Peace,

Allan

Peace Through His Blood

December 17, 2013 / / 0 Comments

“God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” ~Colossians 1:19-20

The creator and sustainer of the universe is our crucified Lord. We know our Savior as a human being. He became a man. Christ Jesus’ supremacy and lordship over all things is rooted in and finds its greatest expression in his salvation acts. His service. His sacrifice. His death. The head of the Church is the one who was shamefully crucified. And our Lord endured this, he obediently walked to the cross, not to judge or destroy, but to reconcile and renew. To make peace.

Jesus is proclaimed the eternal King of All when he takes up that cursed tree.

Shirley Guthrie wrote:

“He is not like a king who preserves his majesty and honor only by shutting himself up in the splendor of his palace, safely isolated from the misery of the poor peasants and the threat of his enemies outside the fortress. His majesty is a majesty of a love so great that he leaves the palace and the royal trappings to live among his subjects as one of them, sharing their condition even at the risk of vulnerability to the attack of his enemies. If we want to find this King, we will find him among the weak and lowly, his genuine majesty both revealed and hidden in his choosing to share their vulnerability, suffering, guilt, and powerlessness.”

God sends the creator of the universe not in fear and terror, but in gentleness and meekness. He sends him saving and persuading, not ordering and directing. Jesus comes to us calling, not commanding. Loving, not judging. And all of that is what saves us. His blessed birth, his wonderful life, his miraculous healings, his wise teachings, his compassionate care for others, his obedient suffering, his sacrificial death, his glorious resurrection, and his eternal exaltation — that is what saves us. It redeems us. It reconciles all of creation back to the one who created it and sustains it. And it’s beautiful.

He shared our life. He experienced our suffering. He bore our sin. Those of us who are members of Christ’s Body, the Church over which he is head, find our sins already canceled by his death. And we find the dominion of darkness and sin with all its power and authority already defeated.

“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave all our sins, having canceled the written code with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” ~Colossians 2:13-15

Peace,

Allan

Christmas is Revolutionary

December 5, 2013 / / 0 Comments

As children of God, we believe we are called to imitate God and to join him in doing the same kind of work he’s doing. So, at Christmas time we ask: What was God doing at that stable in Bethlehem? What does the birth of Jesus tell us about God’s great work? And how do we partner with him in doing that work?

In sending his Son to this sick and dying world, our Father is reaching out to people in need. He’s seeking people who are wounded. He’s treating them as equals. He’s coming alongside them, getting his hands dirty with them.

Christmas is revolutionary!

Through Jesus, God acts to lift the lowly, to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to forgive the sinner. God, through his Son, turns chaos into peace, shines light into darkness, turns the lost into the saved, and changes the dead and hopeless into the eternally alive. God in Christ, having put on our earthly flesh, tears down barriers, destroys distinctions, and fixes what’s wrong. As children of God and disciples of his Christ, we’re called to the same purpose.

We’re called to join our God as partners in this incarnation work. We’re committed to seeking out people in need. We’re resolved to open our doors and our hearts to the lonely and distressed people in our communities who are dying for a word of grace from our King.

What happened among the animals and the shepherds that night is revolutionary. It turned the world upside down. And we’re called to no less today.

May God through Christ bless you richly during this special season with his everlasting joy and peace.

Allan

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