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The Upload

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

I pray you had a blessed week and I wish you a Happy New Year!

As we bring the Season of Christmas to a close this Sunday, we are reminded in our Gospel text (John 1:1-18) that Jesus has always been present in creation. John tells us that “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” In Jesus, God became human and God chose to live among us ordinary people. For me, this is often a hard concept to understand, but Martin Luther once said, “The mystery of humanity of Christ, that he sunk himself into our flesh, is beyond all human understanding.” In other words, it is not a truth that can be explained by science or logic; it can only be proclaimed as revealed truth.

In a brief and powerful way, John proclaims to us that Jesus is the living, breathing, very human, life-giving power of God. This is important because it made God’s love for us real and tangible. And not only did God make himself tangible for us, but he also chose to live with us. In many places in scripture, this relationship between God and his people is referred to as a marriage. God chose to love us and God entered into a permanent, forever relationship with us, just like a human marriage is intended to be.

But God’s love for us is more than a “romantic love,” which is what most people think of when they decide to get married. For God, real love is more than just two people finding their heart’s desire in each other, candlelight dinners, moonlit walks, eternal bliss. No, real love for God is about intentionally accepting the other person as they are. God chose to love all of us, and live with us as we are. He chose to live with us, even with all our flaws!

You know, I have presided at the weddings of many couples over the years, and when Jill and I meet with these couples in their premarital sessions, we try to remind them that love is more than romance; it is something that has to be worked on every day. Romantic love is great, but marriage is more than that. It is also about two people living together, struggling to work out their differences, accepting one another’s flaws and shortcomings, and living face to face in a living, breathing, less-than-ideal-but oh-so-realistic relationship. And so it is with us and God. God became flesh and lived among us because God was not willing to be a far-off, idealistic God. God knew that, for this relationship to be real, it had to be fleshed out, and that “fleshing out” continues today for each of us in the life of the church, the “body of Christ” as we each attempt to live out our faith and love for God in our efforts to live lives of love with one another and the world. Just like a marriage, it is seldom perfect. It is always a work in progress. It requires work to iron out our differences and accept one another’s flaws and shortcomings, to forgive, and trust, and love and go forward together.

My New Year’s prayer for each of you is that, as we enter this new year, each of us is willing to continue to work on our relationship with our Lord, that each of us is willing to work on our broken relationships with each other, and that together we might continue to build a permanent, forever marriage relationship with our Lord and Savior.

Happy New Year & Shalom,

Pastor Dave

Tags: Weekly Word