SESSION THREE
GOD IN PLAIN CLOTHES
The glory of God through the ordinary
“And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory.
The glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth….
…and from his fullness we have all received and grace for grace,
for the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God at any time. The only begotten Son
who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.”
John 1:18
This reference from the gospel of John has shaped another core Christian truth. In theological circles it has taken the word, “incarnation.” It refers to the fact that Jesus was God revealed through the medium of humanity. Like the doctrine of the Trinity it is essential not in the way a trophy may take an important place on a shelf in the lounge room of someone’s home, but the way a primary tool is important to carpentry. It is an expression of the nature of God. Any work of God must be some kind of expression of the nature of God. The way church is configured is a work of God. For church not to reflect the incarnation is as false as church that fails to reflect the Trinity, or the resurrection.
The phrase from the text “and dwelt among us” is very beautiful in the original language of the New Testament. The words say that Jesus, the Word of God, became flesh and pitched his tent with ours. In its own context it was a powerful statement of the desire of God to live in the midst of his people. It was literally true when Moses was commanded to built the tabernacle in the wilderness. All the Israelite tribes pitched their tents on the four sides of a square. The tabernacle Moses built under instruction from God was erected in the middle of the square. God was no longer on a mountain somewhere with fire and smoke. He was living with them in their midst. He was still the holy God and there were strong symbols of his holiness all through the tabernacle activities. But God was in the midst of them.
The full revelation of God’s glory
We learn from Hebrews 1 that Jesus was the full expression of the God’s glory and the exact image of his Person (1:3). The idea of a full expression of God’s glory demands that we understand that there are less than full expressions of his glory. The context refers to this in the sense that there was a measure of glory in the “word” that was spoken by the prophets of God. We can also see that in the Old Testament there were all kinds of things that happened on the earth that were expressions of God’s glory. There was glory when the cloud and pillar of fire hovered at the Israelite camp. There was glory when Moses first completed the tabernacle (Ex. 40). The same thing happened when Solomon dedicated the temple (2 Chron. 6,7). The interesting thing to note with this expression of glory was that everyone saw it no matter whether they were believers or not. If you were a pagan visiting Jerusalem on the day described in 2 Chron. 6,7 you would have seen the fire and the impact of the presence of God on the priests in the temple. You might have explained in differently perhaps, but you would have witnessed that glory as it really was.
The glory of Jesus was a different kind of glory. It was without a single doubt the greater measure of glory and the greater manifestation of glory. Hebrews says that very clearly. We might ask the question as to when that glory appeared in Jesus. We would hardly suggest that it showed up the day he was baptized by John. No, he was the expression of the fullness of glory from the beginning. He was glory in the womb of his mother, Mary. He was the glory when he worked in his father’s carpenter’s shop. He was the glory when he grew up in Nazareth. Mary knew he was the Messiah. Just think of what it would have been like to live thirty years with the Messiah growing up before your eyes. The most powerful part of that experience would have been the fact that the boy was so ordinary. There was no magic. He didn’t sleep suspended fifty centimeters above the bedroll. He didn’t walk through walls. He didn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. Unlike “Superman” he didn’t slowly develop superpowers as he grew. He always had everything he would ever have from day one. It was a matter of the timing of God’s purpose. That’s why Jesus talks like he does to his mother at the wedding in Cana (John 2). When they have no wine, Mary looks to the Son of God for help with the problem. His response is profound: “Woman, what does your concern have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” (John 2:4). What happened next was the way the fullness of glory shows up in the ordinary. It was an ordinary wedding with ordinary people. Jesus didn’t come with a T shirt on advertising himself as a winemaker. He didn’t show up with the intention of turning water into wine. In that amazing way that God works, an “ordinary” man ordered the servants to fill water jars with water. When it was done the water was attested to be the very best vintage going around. Even the fact that the servants, Mary and the disciples knew but no one else knew carried the atmosphere of piquant mystery.
So God was living in a house in Nazareth and the fact that the people of Nazareth wanted to stone him later on for what they perceived as blasphemous arrogance shows that they saw nothing for thirty years that convinced them that he was God.
God also stood in a line with other Jewish people on the banks of the Jordan River where John was baptizing people as a preparatory act of repentance for having missed it so badly for so long as far as the purpose of God was concerned. When he stood before John the only reason John (his second cousin) knew that Jesus was the Messiah was because the Spirit of God had given him a pre-arranged signal. He knew that someone would show up and a dove would come down and rest on him (John 1).
The ministry of Jesus carried on this powerful marriage of supernatural and natural, divine and human. Divine in the sense that a very different authority flowed when he preached, healing flowed when he touched, demons departed when he commanded and life was in all of his words to the disciples. He could walk through an angry crowd of Nazareth residents who wanted to kill him. He put fear into the religious leaders who opposed him. He gave hope to the people who had none. He imparted a sense of worth to all kinds of groups in the society who were held in common contempt. At the very same time could be challenged with self righteous fervor and without restraint by his opponents. There was no climate or awe accompanying his daily activities. There was no set of angels walking with him that gave the message that he was the real life Son of God leaving footprints on the dusty trails around Galilee and Judea. He was so vulnerable to his disciples that Peter felt totally free to give him some good advice when he talked about dying on a cross.
Ordinary People, Ordinary Circumstances: the Stage Set for the Fullness of Glory
Not only was Jesus impeccably ordinary, he also called followers who were ordinary. The ones he chose as disciples were all Galileans. They were outstandingly ordinary. Galilee was the backside of nowhere by all the opinions that mattered in Jesus’ day. They spoke like country hicks and the fact that they were separated from Judea by Samaria gave more strength to the Jerusalem based view that they were always to be regarded with suspicion and would never amount to anything. Nathanial makes the definitive statement: “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (John 1). The answer is: INCARNATION. God appears on the earth dressed in the plain clothes of Nazareth, speaking with a Galilean accent and the son of a tradesman and his wife who couldn’t maintain their virtue prior to marriage. All of this, viewed through the eyes of religious aristocracy was about as low as you could go.
When Jesus sent out seventy two others to visit all the places he was going to be coming to (Luke 10) they do what he says and Satan crashes so fast he needs to be compared to lightning striking the earth. The no name apostles get to do it and Jesus leaps with joy when it is done. He says that “children” have been doing what was regarded as the exclusive domain of specially selected adults.
On the day of Pentecost there were a hundred and twenty Galileans in an upper room hoping no one would hear their accent and associate them with a guy who had just been killed by the Romans on behalf of the religious mafia. Suddenly they are all speaking in languages they have never learned but with accents that give away their origin and the nations of the world that are gathered get touched by heaven’s heart of love. We don’t know most of their names. We do know that believers were sent out to nations all over the world as a result of their obedience and faith. God showed up in the street outside the upper room in Jerusalem and ordinary people saw God as his glory was made manifest through ordinary people. They were indeed the body of Jesus. They were ordinary people. It was an ordinary day in the city (there had been plenty of ordinary Feasts of Weeks before that one). It was singled out because these people were the incarnation of Jesus Christ in that circumstance at that time.
The Culture Wars of the Early Church
The incarnation strikes a more incisive blow to fallen humanity when, despite the best efforts of the church to keep Judaism and faith in Jesus tied together, Gentiles start getting saved and don’t have any inclination to become Jews. Paul the ex-Pharisee champions the cause of cross cultural or incarnational ministry. He preaches the gospel and people are saved. The church in Antioch is amazing. The very first church that represents heaven (heaven being every nation, tribe, family and language group worship together before the Throne of God). The gospel is preached to Greeks. God moves powerfully upon them and they join with Jewish brothers and sisters to form the first church of its kind. This church becomes the sending base for Paul’s missionary ministry to Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans. He speaks the language of their culture and lives the lifestyle of their culture and sees the redemption of their culture. Some in the Jewish church, especially in Jerusalem were convinced that Gentile nations should not embrace Jesus without embracing Jewish religious culture.
All of the issues written about in the letters of the New Testament have to do with the kingdom of God becoming incarnate within the ordinary lives of the people in those cultures. Through this incarnational ministry homes, cities and nations were transformed and the transformation turned out different in every case. This is the result of ministry that takes seriously the incarnation of Jesus Christ. As with Jesus, apostles like Paul took on the nature of the people he was ministering to (cp. 1 Corinthians 9) as his Saviour had done. He spoke their language and spoke into their lifestyles.
THE INCARNATION AND THE CHURCH WHERE YOU ARE
All of this is very powerful and inspiring. We need to bed this down in the circumstances of our own lives and the spheres where we seek to serve as members of a church that would proclaim the kingdom of God with grace and truth. Here are some issues that arise from a commitment ministry that reproduces the incarnation of Jesus.
To help us here we will look again at a passage from the letter to the Philippians.
1 If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4 Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2
We need churches that look like Jesus when they begin to take shape. Jesus was the Word of God as much as he proclaimed the Word of God. He was church and he established church. The church, we are told is his body. It must be like him in every conceivable way. What would a church look like if it embraced the reality of the Incarnation? The words from Philippians seem to indicate at least four distinguishing characteristics.
SELF EMPTYING
6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7but made himself nothing,
This is not a term that fills our minds with joy and excitement. It sounds hard and it feels uncomfortable. Here is the simple path that this process involved for Jesus. Let’s see if it translates into experience we can envisage as being “Jesus like.”
He was originally a spirit being
He had status and glory of a full member of the Godhead
He set aside the status, titles, and the privilege and the “security” of heaven
He set aside the resources that were available to him as a member of the Godhead
He saw no comparative value in hanging on to previous status when there was opportunity to set it aside and become like the creatures made in his image
He deliberately chose to enter the plane of human history without any kind of status that would afford him intrinsic opportunity or authority
When we set out to see a church planted in a given sphere we are so prone to think that we need to make use of all kinds of humanly derived credentials and resources. The commitment to incarnation sees no intrinsic value in any of these. In fact, incarnation does not rely on being clever or smart. It relies on a relationship with the Father and the immanent power of the Holy Spirit.
Very often we are prone to want to take the high ground by humanly recognized titles and credentials (educational, social, demographic etc.). Jesus clearly set those aside. When he was growing up in Nazareth there was nothing outside of his relationship to his Father in heaven that was going to give him a chance of doing anything other than carpentry. One day he left home for the Jordan River and all of heaven broke loose around him and his ministry. We need to give away the idea that becoming “somebody” is of value. The “somebody” we need to care about is the opportunity to be a loving son or daughter of our heavenly Father. If we do what flows from that identity then we will have all the opportunity we need.
SERVANTHOOD
taking the very nature of a servant,
Here is a tricky little number. Very often this idea has been taken by Christians to mean that everyone else sets their agenda and marks out their territory by reason of the fact that we are called to serve. We are indeed called to serve, but called to serve as Jesus was called to serve. Jesus served people through teaching them, healing them, casting out demons from them. They were never his master even though he was a servant to them. The Father was clearly his master. His agenda was daily set by his Father and that agenda served the loving purposes of God for people he cared about.
The strong servant model of Jesus ought to flow through us in such a way that we would be willing to meet the people at the point of their felt needs and meet those needs with the resources that come from heaven: supernatural love and esteem, supernatural grace, supernatural wisdom and supernatural power. We have a kit of stuff to use in the way we serve people that connects them with heaven. Think for a bit about the way Jesus defined the nature and process of servanthood. He said of himself: “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew ) He also spoke about servanthood in the context of an argument about who was the greatest.
Write down some of the aspects of his kind of servanthood that you notice in the ministry of Jesus.
Serving people out of the resources we have that represent Jesus is a profound and powerful weapon. It is not just handing out food and running second hand clothing stores. It is a matter of engaging people with heaven through servant acts of kindness.
The church you plant in some community sphere must be characterized by its servanthood. That was why so many people like being where Jesus was. They were esteemed in love by his wiliness to serve them in the name of His Father.
OTHERNESS
being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man,
Here is the amazing example of Jesus. If you think of humanity as a people group with totally different language, culture and values to your own, then Jesus didn’t just go for a visit. He didn’t even take out a resident’s visa. He didn’t go for dual citizenship. He became human for the rest of eternity. There is a man seated at the right hand of God. What measure of identification could be greater than that. So great was the transposition of God that Jesus adopted a very strong name and used this name about himself more than any other: “Son of man” - nearly eighty times in the gospels.
FOUR EXAMPLES OF OTHERNESS FROM THE INCARNATION OF JESUS CHRIST HEBREWS 2
1. IDENTIFIED WITH HUMAN SUFFERING
Bringing many sons to glory
10 In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.
To put these aspects of incarnation in perspective it might be helpful to think about moving from a country like Australia where there is comparative wealth, peace and safety, to one of the places around the world where there was oppression and trouble. Your first set of inclinations would be to ask whether it was really important to go there. If it was, your second set would all have to do with personal safety. So many people from western nations travel the world going from one western style hotel to another and from one English speaking group to another. They maintain as much of what is preferred and culturally familiar. They view the other parts of the world from the vantage point of facilities and services provided by willing business people who know their well heeled clients want to see a lot but identify with as little as possible. They want to stay the same, and take as little effort and be able to move without discomfort or risk. This is the antithesis of incarnation.
What if you were not just touring another nation? What if you were becoming a temporary resident? How would you avoid the idea of incarnation? You would build a house like the one you had in your original country. You would wear clothes as much as possible like the ones people were wearing in your native land. You would work hard to plan all sorts of events that reminded you of “home.” You would make sure you kept up your native language. You would seek out other ex-patriots and spend as much time with them as possible. No doubt you would make acquaintances in your new country, but it would be unlikely that they would become as close as those who were “like you.”
Much more could be said about this, but what we need to understand about the incarnational model represented by Jesus Christ is that he didn’t sneak off from his home and go to the local “Angels Club” to play heavenly snooker. Apart from his union with the Father, he spent his time with ordinary people: very ordinary people. He spoke their language, lived in their houses, wore their clothes and ate their food. Not only that but his demonstrated preference was to make friends of “tax collectors and sinners.” Not only that, but the path of righteousness he trod set him constantly at odds with most of the power and glamour people of the day. Not only that but he suffered rejection by his family, his nation and finally his Father. He joined with the worst rejects of society and ended up nailed to the cross by his choice to carry sin that wasn’t his. Whatever is the current sampling of that kind of identification in your sphere that is the path we are called to.
To get a full dose of incarnation you need to read one or more of the gospels and just focus on the suffering and pain Jesus carried up to and through the experience of the cross. When you do that have in mind just how that kind of identification may take shape if you and the church you build in your sphere decided to take the incarnation journey. As you do, ask yourself whether there is any other journey that would embody Biblical legitimacy. At this moment we have a Saviour who is seat
2. IDENTIFIED WITH HUMAN FAMILY
Calling mankind his brothers
11 Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. 12 He says, “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the presence of the congregation I will sing your praises.” 13 And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again he says, “Here am I, and the children God has given me.”
Jesus walked the paths of Judea and Galilee in fellowship with his Father. That fellowship was an extension of the inclusive oneness generated by the heart of the Tri-unity of God. As we have seen from the second chapter of Philippians, the “trappings” of the Godhead were set aside. What people saw and heard was a man. What some were able to also see was the unmistakable imprint of God in everything that this man thought, said and did. Others just saw a man. The missionary heart of God was in Jesus, so his fellowship with his Father energized, inspired and guided his compassion outward.
The second aspect of incarnation is described in the words, “..are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.” Jesus said some powerful things about family. Family was a big deal in the culture of the people Jesus called his own. It is still strong today. It has taken a bashing in our day at the hands of the misguided foolishness of trendy intellectual humanists. It is hard for them to destroy the image of God totally. Parentness and childness still rise up from the ashes. Adopted children have an inbuilt radar signal that will only lock on to their birth parents. Shameless and irresponsible parents have difficulty assuaging the guilt of their neglect. Siblings still have a connection that takes strength to deny. In Jesus’ day it was overtly powerful and socially undergirded. There were significant moral and legal obligations relating to membership of families. A profound moment in the ministry of Jesus came where he was inside a house responding to some challenges from the Pharisees. News came to him that his mother and his brothers were outside wanting to talk with him. Perhaps this was one of those occasions where they sought to intervene because they thought he was mad (Mark 3:21) His response to this piece of information was public. He pointed to twelve people who were his own disciples and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.” Think about the reply that would have been carried outside the crowded house to his family. Remember that this is the fullness of “grace and truth” speaking here. This is the loving God speaking. Jesus isn’t getting even. He hasn’t stopped loving and honouring his mother. He isn’t cheaply using them as an object lesson. He is speaking lovingly about the shape of incarnation. He isn’t just the visiting speaker. He is family. His love for us is both ‘agape’ (I will lay down my life for you no matter who you are or what you do) and ‘phileo’ (you are a brother or sister to me and I am your brother; we are family).
In the cold hard world of community spheres there are people. Some of them are well known and others are little known. Some of them we like and some we don’t. If you take seriously the idea of incarnation you have to let God make them brothers and sisters. They must be family to you. That heart must be in you before it is fulfilled as they are born into God’s family. Jesus is a Son of his Father. We are also sons and daughters of the same family. He thinks about us as such and treats us preferentially as such. The church we build must rise to this. Its members must be brothers and sisters. This has been taught with reasonable clarity over the years. But we need to live it not just use the language. What is even more vital is for the church you serve as Jesus builds it in the community sphere where you live and work must consider the people in your sphere family. You must allow Jesus to show you how to live out this family life. You are the prophetic sign of God’s family in your sphere and the people you relate to are those who are brothers and sisters in your family. That is incarnational.
3. IDENTIFIED WITH HUMAN ALIENATION
Destroying the power of death by his death
14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
The third powerful sign of incarnation is the fact that Jesus not only identified with humanity by becoming a full and complete man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief (cp. Is. 53), not only did he relate to them as family but he identified with their sin and its consequences. He carried no sin of his own to Calvary, he only carried the total measure of the sin of all mankind. He experienced the guilt of it, the shame of it and he had to embrace the consequences of it. He was alienated from his Father as he bore the final stroke of its eternal lash and gave up his life. If you know a single experience of experiencing the blame or the consequences for the sin of another person, you know how your very soul wants to rise up at the injustice. Jesus chose to embrace this injustice. He never once set himself above the sin of the people around him because he was too busy embracing it with compassion and mercy. He saw the lesser as well as the greater and was likewise drawn to the self inflicted victims with nurture and empathy. It was the consistency of his life and carried through to his final incarnational act. He was there instead of me and instead of you.
When you consider your own sphere and seeing a church planted there you must also see the impact of sin through the eyes and through the heart of mercy that would gladly bear and bear with the sins of those to whom you are committed. You need to carry they because of their sin. You need to carry them to the cross since you are not able to bear away their sin or your own. You need to stand in the place of human brokenness and agree to stand there without judgment and without an air of superiority. You see the stupidity. You may never have been that stupid, but why not stand together with the stupid and bear their folly without blame or condemnation. The world has heard enough condemnation from the church. We think that condemning sin is an expression of righteousness when it is nothing more than self righteousness. Condemnation is reserve for the Judge, not the witnesses.
We would be better served if they heard something that would provide an alternative. We would operate with more power if we told a beggar like ourselves where we found something to eat. We would do better if we lifted them up with the arms of our compassion and carried them through sand of their self appointed isolation from God. That would be an expression of incarnation.
4. IDENTIFIED WITH HUMAN SIN
Merciful and faithful high priest
16 For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. 17 For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. 18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
The last expression of incarnation noted here about Jesus Christ has to do with his attitude to the people he was becoming joined to. Jesus experienced every form of coercion and pressure to take a path that would lead him away from fellowship with His Father and His Father’s purpose. Despite the fact that it was a road he had never taken, there were many intersections along the way. Some people take this verse to mean that he must have faced the opportunity to lie but didn’t lie, to become sexually attracted to a woman but remained pure in thought. He must have faced the opportunity to walk in pride but remained humble. He certainly faced the prospect of the cross and sought the possibility of a different option. We will never know the answer to that question. The issue is that Jesus is the one person who knows how to avoid sin. He knows it in the face of an environment given over to sin. In this way he has become what Hebrews calls “the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12). This qualification has everything to do with incarnational life. Jesus wanted to help. He wants to help you and help the people to whom you are committed and that help comes from having walked the road that they have walked. He didn’t avoid life. He embrace it. He didn’t rob a bank so that he would know what its like and therefore be able to help bank robbers not rob banks. He did live in a world that was full of broken people and understood first hand why someone would be stupid enough to think that robbing a bank might be worthwhile. He knew what was in the heart of a rich young guy to be able to deal with his problem in one bold act of faith (Luke 18). He did know what ostracism was like and could speak to lepers with understanding.
There are two things we need to carry together as we seek to follow the pathway that would plant a church in our community sphere that would become and remain incarnational. We must not divorce ourselves from all the sullied issues that mess with the lives of people. We don’t need to participate of course. We do need to understand. Understanding involves listening before speaking and watching before making conclusions. We must assess what we see from the standpoint of the other person, not our own. If you have a read through the ministry of Jesus you will find that his compassion for people and his desire to minister to them demonstrated a huge comparative difference in understanding from the experts of the day who wanted to opposed what he did and the way he did it. The fact was that their approach was totally drawn from their own world of religious legalism. No wonder the ministry of Jesus was so refreshing and exciting for ordinary people. They were used to the cold judgments of the religious leaders. What they felt from Jesus was heavenly grace that gave them hope.
UNQUALIFIED OBEDIENCE
...and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
Philippians 2:8
The final expression of incarnation doesn’t have as much to do with the “man” side of things as the God side. It is a very important aspect of any incarnational ministry that the person wanting to identify with a group of people in some community sphere obey God in that sphere. The strong pull that incarnation creates is the one that pulls the person across a line where they respond to the pressure of that group for the individual or group representing God to become like them in other ways than those which proclaim eternal truth and righteousness. I remember being involved with a great missionary couple who were working in an Asian nation. They were a great couple and he was a wonderful evangelist. He led so many to Christ. He began to teach at an English language school in the heart of one of the most corrupt parts of that city. The people he was meeting every day were not just culturally different, they were morally bankrupt. He ended up living with one of the girls who came to his class and leaving his wife and child. His capacity to identify with the people was admirable. Their acceptance of him and his ministry was enough to make any Christian ministry person envious. His commitment to obey his Father in heaven was negotiable.
The phrase of this verse is very powerful. What it refers to is the fact that Jesus would rather die than disobey his Father. It wasn’t that he reached the point of his commitment to the cross and gained a level of obedience that rose to the occasion. He had that level from the very beginning. And it wasn’t obedience in the sense of fulfilling his duty. It was the abandonment of trust that was devoid of self interest. On any given day his delight in the will and purpose of his Father was such that he would always rather die than choose a path that separated him from his Father’s good purpose. On some days this joy filled choice just meant that he was scorned by the religious leaders. On other days he was just misunderstood by his disciples. On other days he felt the same scorn from his own family. On other days he found his cousin John the Baptist sitting in prison thinking that there must be someone else to come as the Messiah. It was his heart for God’s purpose that resisted the pressures from all of these sources. His agenda anywhere and at any time came from his Father. The reason that this agenda was something else that drove him into the not so welcoming arms of humanity was because the Father’s heart and the Father’s purpose was exclusively committed to the redemption of humankind.
I am always suspicious of people who say they are obeying God but I find that this obedience seems only to have the benefit of themselves in mind. It seems so often that the kingdom of God gets a raw deal. It seems that people sum up an alternative on the basis of what benefit they will gain. All of this is usually justified under the heading of “God’s blessing.” The powerful truth there is that God does want to bless. He wanted to bless his only begotten Son. He blessed him with a family who didn’t understand him, disciples who constantly failed to get the point, crowds who were willing to receive from him but not to stand with him. He was blessed with a set of religious and secular authorities that were constantly out to thwart his mission and ministry. He was blessed with the opportunity to carry shame and blame to the cross. We are told in Hebrews 12 that Jesus should be our example: “…who endured the cross, despising the shame in is seated at the right hand of the throne of God..” We must not stop there of course. He was blessed with the opportunity to gather the sheep who were without a shepherd. He was blessed with eleven disciples who were still there at the end. He was blessed with many others who believed. He was blessed with a church that took on the Roman Empire and eventually won in his Name. He was blessed with the opportunity to open up a new and living way for the peoples of all nations to be reconciled to the God of all the earth. He was blessed with seeing the sick healed, the lame walk, those with demons set free. All of this came because from day one he found his greatest pleasure in embracing his Father’s will and pleasure. It was more than food and more than comfort. It was his delight. This is the blessing we need to claim. The joy that comes from knowing that the good purposes of God for the world that he loves are being fulfilled through what we are doing. If we have that kind of delight, and if we are not tied to a filter that gauges all things by the increase to our own gratification and self absorbing pleasure, then we will face everything including death rather than accept an alternative that is not the will of God.
In the matter of shaping a ministry to a community sphere we have to do it with the idea that we are there to do what God says to do. We may not know how to have a ministry in a given sphere that would see the planting and establishing of a church. God does and wants to. God’s directives will always take us closer to the heart of full and complete identification with our sphere. This is consistent with everything that we know and have seen with God. He wants to dwell in the midst of the people he loves. His representatives in this are ourselves and the people who belong to the church that is planted in this sphere. We must unquestioningly, fully and immediately obey what God says. Even if that seems to cause some upset in the people we are seeking to impact for him, we must trust that upset now will create deeper relationship in the longer term. Obeying God will get us in. Obeying God will gain us favour where we need it and will cause offense where it needs to be caused. We mustn’t allow the two to get confused by compromising our obedience with what seems to work best in a given situation. It is God who will tie us in to the fabric of our spheres and the people in them. We must trust him to know how that will happen best.
CONCLUSION
When Jesus came he did not come with a disguise. He was not God in disguise. He was God in the flesh. The kind of flesh he took on and the manner of his pre-ministry life as well as his ministry demonstrated this amazing heart. As representing the inclusive oneness of God he drew people to himself by being fully drawn to everything they were and everything they could be. This was why there was so much hope around him. This is why the common people flocked to him. It wasn’t posh humanity. It wasn’t narrow band humanity. It was suffering, tested and oppressed humanity that clothed the Word made flesh. And it is the very model of our calling.
Incarnation is not just about putting on God clothes. It is about God clothing himself in you.
It is the ultimate example of otherness. Jesus left no trace of himself. We have no picture of him. No one knows much about his hairstyle or his stylistic preferences (eg. A Beatles hair cut). He came to leave something of himself in you that represents you being more YOU. That’s his trademark. It is the trace of supernatural grace. We are to become more like him but that turns out to be more like who we are supposed to be.
The preoccupation of incarnational ministry is not to brand everyone with our personalities, phrases and affectations. Our obsession must be to sow ourselves into the lives of other people that when it happens they are released to achieve their God ordained destiny.
