Simply knowing that God has moved into the neighborhood is not the same thing as living like God has moved into the neighborhood. Said differently, you may know God is near, but how do you interact with this God? What difference does the Incarnation make in your life or the way you live your life? God is in our midst! The Kingdom of Heaven is within you and all around you! So what!?!
What does the Incarnation mean to you?
1. Do you put God behind you, before you, or beside you?
1.1. God is not a magic fix for our problems in life … he is a partner who makes himself available to journey into them with us … beside us.
1.2. I recently talked to a man who came to me asking about a problem he faced. He couldn’t shake it. At it’s root was a serious misunderstanding of God and God’s role in his life. He saw God as a sort of gate-keeper to all that he considered good in his life. This man believed that to get to all of these good things - or blessings - God the gate-keeper had to deem him worthy. So he set off on a mission to please God as much as he humanly could - which often isn’t much - with the hope that God would open the gate and grant him blessed access to all the good things in life. All this led to was a serious case of spiritual frustration, anxiety, and performance driven discipleship. If he wasn’t getting those things he perceived as “blessings,” then he obviously wasn’t pleasing God! So he tried to pray more, read more, fast more, and he tried to be absolutely perfect. If we gauge life by our performance, and we make God a hard taskmaster who constantly needs us to perform, we will fail while we pray in vain for God to free us from … our own created burden. And the cycle begins.
1.3. God is not some sort of divine reset button. God is interested in participating in our humanity and life. He’s not “out there” and we don’t have to “perform” to gain access to his presence. God is here!
1.4. Psalm 139
This actually is a good segue into the next point of discussion concerning the Incarnation …
2. The Incarnation is a divine expression of intimacy!
2.1. Have you really considered what Jesus of Nazareth, The Christ, did in effort to relate to us? Humanity! He emptied himself completely of all Paul’s description of it in Philippians 2:5-8.
2.2. God, the artists who painted all of life, created life, submitted himself to the rules and order of this life, even death, just to reach us and reconcile the relationship. Intimacy. Intimacy was the point! God desired intimate relationships with each one of us!
Intimacy leads to deep relationship.
3. The Incarnation is a divine invitation to real relationships.
3.1. If we are ever going to move away from the mere knowledge of knowing God lives in our neighborhood and move towards a life lived with this God in our neighborhood, then we are going to have to lose the masks. We have to lose the masks with which we try in vain to fool God; we are going to have to lose the masks we put on when we are in the presence of one another. You see, Incarnational intimacy and the relationship that follows are not compatible with masks. We are all stripped naked in the shinning of the Incarnation. We are naked before one another (Read Genesis 3:7); we are all naked before God (Read Genesis 3:8-12).
3.2. The Incarnation invites each one of us into real, unmasked, love relationships with God and with one another.
3.3. “It is not the nature of love to force a relationship but it is the nature of love to open the way” (Quote:The Shack). So, please lose the spiritually poisonous idea that participation in this love relationship with God requires perfection and performance. It’s not true.
3.4. God is not with us in our neighborhood to inflict guilt or send on us a never ending journey of performance driven blah
3.5. Rules & principles are simpler than relationships (Quote:The Shack). Remember, there was no shortage of rules and principles prior to the Incarnation. If life was all about rules and principles, then there was no need for the Incarnation. The Incarnation was and is the world’s introduction to relationship. Relationships are harder, but with God all things are possible!