Sunday, December 2, 2012

God With Us!


In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. His name was called Immanuel: God With Us!

 Our celebration of the birth of Christ is our celebration of God with us and we with God! God did not simply dress Himself in our “flesh” to come and simply dwell in our midst. He is “with us” because is He is one of us, sharing in our very humanity! Praise be to God! He is “with us” because He has partaken of our very nature, sharing in all that we are as human beings (except for sin): our relationships, our joys, our accomplishments, our surprises; our sorrows, our aches and pains, our failures, our darkness and yes, even our alienation and estrangement. He is not simply in our midst—He is with us! He is one with us!

 And praise God we are with Him! By the Spirit we have been joined to Him in Christ. We are now partakers of the divine nature, sharing in the very life of God. In uniting us to Himself, Christ has brought us to participate with Him through the Spirit in His relationship with the Father. “Our lives are hidden with Christ in God.”

 A great theologian put it this way: “What we have in Christ in none other than Immanuel, God with us, but because that is God with us, in our being, our very bones and flesh and blood, it also means we with God. If we with God is not true, then God with us is not true. God with us means that God almighty insists on sharing his divine life with us, on binding himself up with us in the same bundle of existence and being and life, so that we may share with him his divine life. That has been once and for all consummated in Jesus Christ, so that God has for ever and ever committed himself to us and will no more abandon us than he will abandon himself in Jesus Christ.”

Blessed be the Babe in the manger: God with us! Amen!