Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ incarnation, the embodiment of God in the form of a human. It’s time for us to do our version of an incarnation.
In This Article:
Following Jesus means surrendering our identity so that we can be transformed into his likeness: An identity that looks and lives like him.
The practice of following Jesus in a Western context often defaults to believing that God exists to help us attain the identity and the life that we desire.
If you chase after the life/identity that you want, you may very well give up the opportunity to embody the life/identity that God has in store for you.
Key Application:
See yourself as a living incarnation of Christ.
It's time to speak frankly.
Honestly, I can't think of a better time. After all, we've just celebrated the once-in-human-history event of the God of eternity taking on human form: Emmanuel, God with us. The Word inhabiting flesh and bone and walking amongst us.
This is what "incarnation" means, in case you didn't know. It's based on the Latin word incarnatio which means "becoming flesh" or "embodiment."
In a very real sense, Jesus' incarnation is a model of our own incarnation. I mean this, of course, as a play on words. I'm not suggesting that we can be God inhabiting human form. But because of believers' union with Christ, we are the human form that God inhabits.
In my article posted on Christmas Eve, I mentioned that at some point (likely in early childhood) Jesus became aware of his identity, and with it his purpose. And he dedicated the rest of his earthly life to living out his identity on purpose.
It’s interesting to think about when Jesus (as a human) became aware of the truth that he was the Son of God. Here’s the link to that article, if you want to give it a read:
The question for us is profoundly simple: Will we follow his example, or not?
God came to earth not just to be among us, but to be IN us—and for US to be IN HIM. God came to earth as one of the final steps of restoring humankind back to its original, created identity (to be his image-bearers) and purpose (to partner with him in managing his creation).
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