After a glorious December of singing and celebrating the incarnation, I wonder why, come January, the Christian church packs up the songs, sermons and services about the incarnation, to be stashed in the roof-space with the tinsel and tree until next Christmas.
The incarnation is for life, not just for Christmas.
The Christian church desperately needs to breathe, speak and live incarnation life all year round because we are immersed in a culture that’s failing miserably to answer the question: what does it means to be human? If I want to find out, if I want to live the fullest, truest version of the life of Donna Jennings, I need to root my whole self in the incarnate place and person where humanity and God intersect.
Jesus, through the incarnation, provides the only space where both God and humanity exist as one, where heaven and earth come back together. It is in this incarnate person that I find life. Life in abundance. Life in fullness.
The God-become-human event, incarnation, is not just the game-changing event of cosmic, eternal history, but the game-changing event of my story, and your story.
The incarnation is not just about the cute little baby presented on the Christmas card, but the whole life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
The incarnation means that the human death, human resurrection and human ascension of Jesus are not isolated events and miracles that happened only to Him, in His story, 2000 years ago, never to be repeated or experienced by anyone else.
In fact, the Christian faith invites me to believe and to live that because of the incarnation, the death, resurrection and ascension are events that are to happen to me, in my story.
The incarnate Jesus invites me to believe and live out the reality that I, Donna Jennings, have died with Christ, am raised with Christ, and have been seated in Him at the right hand of the Father (Romans 6:8, Ephesians 2:6).
Through the incarnate Jesus, God has united Himself with human nature so that He could unite us to His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).
The incarnate Jesus offers not just the forgiveness of sin for future judgement, but here and now transforms us into the new creation, filled with eternal life (2 Corinthians 5.17).
The incarnate Jesus now invites me to place all my preferences and plans back into His eternal plan. He makes it possible for me to participate with Him, in His purposes for His world, as I pray and pursue His kingdom in my place and my time.
And so, whatever your experience of life as human beings, the incarnate Jesus has come – lived, died, risen and ascended – that you might have life, and have it to the full (John 10.10).
"The incarnate Jesus invites me to believe and live out the reality that I, Donna Jennings, have died with Christ, am raised with Christ, and have been seated in Him at the right hand of the Father"
As you enter the week ahead with all that your life holds: work and world, relationships and restrictions, dreams and disappointments, fun and failure, passions and pain, do you want to live? I mean, truly, fully live?
Do you want to be the fullest, truest version of yourself that you can possibly be?
Then lean in to who you are in Christ, the incarnate God-human, game-changer of history and game-changer of each human story. Believe and live out this truth:
The incarnation is for life. Not just for Christmas.
