We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

foot_washing

Living Incarnationally

The Christian faith is centered on the belief that in Jesus Christ God became a human being. This is commonly referred to as the doctrine of the incarnation. It means that in Jesus, God became embodied. God left the blessed domain of heaven, was born in Bethlehem, and took on our humanity that we might share in the blessedness of heaven. He took on our sin so that we might share in his righteousness. He entered the domain of Satan’s oppressive reign to free us and transform the world into a domain of his loving reign. Jesus is God’s loving embodiment in the world.

As the embodiment of God, Jesus perfectly manifested what God is like. This is why the New Testament authors refer to Jesus as the Word of God (John 1:1), the image of God (Col 1:15), and the perfect expression of God’s very essence (Heb 1:3). It’s why Jesus could say, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Because Jesus is the embodiment of God, all of our thinking about God must be centered upon him.

But the earliest Christians understood that the incarnation wasn’t just about what God did once upon a time in Jesus. Because Jesus reveals who God really is, the incarnation tells us something about what God is always doing. It’s also about the incarnation of God today. While there’s only one incarnate Son of God, God is always embodying himself in the world. He does this primarily by identifying with those who submit their lives to him.

This is why Jesus followers are collectively referred to as “the Body of Christ.” We are, in a very real sense, an extension of Jesus’ earthly body. We are God’s hands, feet, and mouth in the world.

This is illustrated by the two volumes written by Luke. The gospel of Luke is about the ministry of Jesus, and Acts is about the early church. Luke opens Acts by noting that in his “former book” he wrote about “all that Jesus began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1). The second book then is about all that Jesus continues to do and to teach. The Gospel was about what God did through Jesus’ incarnate body, while Acts is about what God continues to do through Jesus’ second, corporate body.

The followers of Jesus are called to imitate God in all things (Eph 5:1-2). This includes imitating his incarnational love in the ways we fully enter into the life of others. We are called to live incarnationally. Jesus reveals that God is a God who is willing to set aside the blessedness of his own domain and become fully present to others. So too, we are called to be a people who are willing to set aside the comforts and conveniences of our own lives and become fully present to others. This is part of what it means to “be imitators of God” and “live in love as Christ loved us and gave his life for us” (Eph 5:1-2). As we live incarnationally, God himself is continuing to be embodied in the world.

—Adapted from Present Perfect, pages 118-120

Photo credit: paukrus via VisualHunt / CC BY

Related Reading

A Christ-Follower’s Alternative to New Year’s Goals

tomo tang via Compfight Richard Dahlstrom over at Fibonacci Faith offered an alternative to setting New Year’s goals that can steal peace in our lives. What if we committed to attending to all the little revelations God gives us and made space to absorb these God-moments in order to respond well? Let’s all make this…

The Incarnation: Paradox or Contradiction?

We’re in the process of flushing out the theology of the ReKnew Manifesto, and we’ve come to the point where we should address the Incarnation. This is the classical Christian doctrine that Jesus was fully God and fully human. Today I’ll simply argue for the logical coherence of this doctrine, viz. it does not involve…

Topics:

“Whatever it means, it cannot mean that.”

pure9 via Compfight Roger Olson wrote a great article a couple of days ago entitled Why (High) Calvinism Is Impossible. He points out that there is no way to understand God as “good” while also believing in double predestination. The idea that God predestines some to heaven and a vast majority to hell for his “glory”…

Is Jesus Really God?

While it is true that Jesus Himself never comes out and explicitly says He is God in the Gospels, He is everywhere portrayed in terms that lead us to conclude to the same thing. He says things like “If you see Me, you see the Father,” “Honor Me even as you honor the Father,” and…

The Holy Alternative

God is holy because he’s utterly “other” and distinct from anything in the created world. Certain objects are called holy because they’re set apart from common objects, having been consecrated to God for a special purpose. And God’s people are called to be holy by virtue of the radically different kind of life we live.…

The One True Image of God: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 4

This point is emphasized throughout the New Testament because, if we don’t get this, we are left to our own imaginations about God, and we’ll draw from a multitude of different sources to construct a mental picture of God that will, to one degree or another, fall short of the beauty of the true God…