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.
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
Category: General
Tags: Body of Christ, Incarnation, Jesus
Topics: Following Jesus
Related Reading
Sermons: Resurrection Principle
Is the resurrection of Jesus true? The entire Christian faith rests on if is or not. In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd goes through a few historical proofs as to why this is true. It is important to remember Christ’s resurrection and the meaning, purpose and principle behind it. In the full sermon, Greg…
Nothing but Christ Crucified
One of the most remarkable expressions of the all-encompassing nature of the cross is reflected in an incidental, but extremely important, comment that Paul made in his First Letter to the Corinthians. He noted that when he brought “the testimony of God” to Corinth, he hadn’t come “with eloquence or human wisdom”. He instead “resolved…
From Boston, With Love
We posted some of T. C. Moore’s reflections on the Open 2013 conference earlier this week. T. C. lives in Boston and was deeply moved by the violence and terror that came to his city. Now we want to share his most recent blog post Oz and the Cross: Reflections on God’s Love and the…
What To Do With the Violent God of the Old Testament
For eight years Greg has been researching for and writing the book entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. In it he confronts the commonly held idea that the Old Testament depictions of God behaving violently should be held alongside of and equal to the God revealed through Jesus dying on the cross. But if the Old Testament…
Isn’t the Gospel of John unreliable compared to the Synoptic Gospels?
Question: The Jesus Legend persuaded me that the Gospels are generally reliable. But I remain very skeptical of the reliability of the Gospel of John. It was written long after the Synoptics, and its view of Jesus barely resembles that of the Synoptics. The main reason this skepticism of John’s Gospel is significant is that…
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 6
This is the sixth of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg addresses the apparent discrepancies in the genealogies of Luke and Matthew and the implausibility of the idea that they were simply fabricated. We’ve been hearing that people are using…