Immanuel – God in us

Christmas is a great time for a pioneer. A big part of a pioneer’s job is to discern what makes a particular culture tick, and then finding starting points for sharing the gospel. Christmas is one of those few occasions in the year when everyone is thinking and doing pretty much the same thing. That’s not to say, of course, that everyone has a very positive experience of Christmas, far from it, but it’s pretty hard in our society to escape its reach.

The message of Christmas is nicely encapsulated in one of Jesus best known titles, Immanuel – God with us. The Message translation brings this home nicely with its rendering of John 1:14 ‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood’. A transcendent God became immanent in the person of Jesus.

But of course God is no longer with us in this physical sense any more. Instead, something even more remarkable and unexpected happened. God is no longer with us; instead he is now in us. When Jesus ascended he sent his Spirit to dwell in his followers. God moved from transcendence to immanence and then to a depth of intimacy never experienced by humanity before.

This new intimacy with God, however, brings with it a great missional responsibility. Whereas previously Jesus himself demonstrated God’s love for the world, now we are the bearers of that love. With God’s Spirit dwelling in us, we are called to ‘move into the neighborhood’ and embody a life lived in relationship with God. Now we are God’s gift to the world!

So as a pioneer, my job – and all our jobs – is to prayerfully consider how we can be God’s gift to our community this Christmas. Jesus is our model of how we should go about this, and more than anything else he partied and told [often cryptic] stories about God’s coming kingdom. So our job as Jesus’ followers is to throw parties, not just for our friends, but for those people we know about who are hurting this Christmas. So me and Hannah, for example, will be throwing a party for our street and at Sycamore House, and inviting those people we know who are on their own to join us for Christmas. And we’re also thinking about how to creatively tell the story of God’s coming kingdom.

So as we prepare for Christmas this year let’s make time to prayerfully consider the missional implication of the amazing truth that God is now in us.