in the flesh

The reason I am sharing this story during the Christmas season is because this is the reason for the incarnation. Coming for us. The broken, hurting, lost ones, getting rescued. Wrapped up in selfishness, we were a mess inside. We do not want to forget the clarity of our own troubled story, and where we were heading. Our past crises. We do not want to forget the former needs that drove us to Jesus. After awhile, it is universal how we tend to think we were morally better than someone with their own messes. Perhaps unaware of our own blind spots, our chronic selfishness that gets challenged as it now becomes transformed with Christ leading us. Sometimes we think we see other’s messes so clearly. Easy peasy. If they would just let me pull the speck out of their eye. I see their issue so clearly. Jesus came because we were simply lost in darkness full of damaging behavior.

Not knowing spiritual north from south. We just did not see that we were 100% the problem. Everyone who desires radical change must own up. The mother allowing abuse to happen to her is a picture of brokeness, of moral failure, without spiritual clear-mindedness. Lost and troubled. We were all there. She needed relevant truth and a serious heart change to make the right kind of decisions going forward. Just like what we needed in the day. And still do.

Christmas is about Hope. We have heard the Christmas story so many times that we can miss the point of it. We can become desensitized by familiarity and by the “odd add-ons of our culture” with the Christmas message. The significance of Christmas is the incarnation. Emmanuel. God with us. The eternal, living “Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us.” The Father’s eternal plan erupting unexpectedly.

If I were God, yes, El Guapo, the humble one, I would grab each person with my hands and turn them upside down and shake them until they came to their senses. “The throttle revelation.” Because people might miss the central, quintessential event of the whole universe. People might pass by and only see the external appearance of the understated Son of God passing by. Who came in the fulness of time to make the Father known, and interrupt us from pursuing our paltry, worthless things. Yes, I would seriously shake each and everyone. Maybe yell, “Don’t miss Jesus!” My idea of rescue.

But Jesus was sent with no fanfare. By the Father who calculates to the nth degree. Sent Jesus. Too easily overlooked. With something inside of Him that no one saw or had an inkling about. Even His closest followers missed it. All of the angels’ eyes were glued to our small planet because of the Son walking about. They knew. The Son in flesh!!! The mystery was unfolding. Clearly Jesus was on a mission in the broken, damaged, dark realm of man. Eyes from Heaven’s realm were riveted. Do we know Who has come? Why He has come? What was He going to do? How Jesus might be relevant to each one of us? But only the Godhead knew what it would mean for each of us PERSONALLY? How JESUS would effect each life.

Jesus was on a mission to describe the unknown, but eternally real Kingdom. To show us the Father’s nature, and the Father’s compelling plan and desire for us. But Jesus was carrying something inside of Him for each one of us. No one in heaven or earth expected what was to happen. Except the Father and Jesus with the Holy Spirit. It was Their plan. The Christmas story is celebrated because of what happened to the human race with the incarnation and because of It. The abused mother is the kind of person Jesus would come after. Reach into our realm for her. But how does Jesus still move incarnationally?

Kalyn–meeting with someone in our simple “office.”

It sounds too cold, too distant, too clinical to use the phrase “the mission of Jesus.” Everything Jesus does literally begins in another divine, unimagined realm of mystery and wonder and blows into our limited, familiar realm in a physical/material way. “He came to His own.” He is One of us–the Son of Man. Jesus comes into our material world so that we could experience Him with all of who we are. Relationally. Thats the Father’s brilliant idea. But we still have not described what Jesus was carrying with Him that was the life-changer for each of us. The abused mother, like the innumerable before her, was to discover what Jesus carried.

our office–where we have spent many hours with various people...

The mother had told her story to Kalyn. Because of her needs she had been living with the boyfriend who had become progressively abusive–physically. Like the proverbial frog in the boiling water, she simply adjusted and continued staying with him. It is hard for us to fathom this. Though in the past we may have tolerated behavior in ourselves that was unacceptable. In the middle of our hurt, our confusion, our disappointments, we lose perspective. We cling to the familiar. Even though her daughter, her son-in-law, and others pleaded with her to get out of the damaging relationship. It is not always rational, but brokeness is driven by intense needs and its peculiar logic.

Rationalizations for destructive behavior. The cast on her arm happened because of the abusive boyfriend hitting her and breaking her arm. After it was set in the doctor’s office, it was broken again in another fit of anger by the boyfriend. As she poured out her story, Kalyn listened to more than her words. She listened to another Voice coming from the revelatory realm in which we are now connected. Wisdom that changes lives only comes from Jesus. Wisdom is a personal extension from the Godhead into us. We are connected. As members of the true church, we are the actual body of Jesus. He moves with us.

What the hurting mother needed was not our best ideas and directives. That would never sustain her or even give her hope. She needed meaningful connection to the incarnated Jesus. She needed what we continue to need to thrive–a “relationship” that changes us on the inside. Relationship with Jesus. What each of us need is the full authentic Jesus, not a conceptual Jesus, or a remote, historical Jesus, or an idea of Jesus two thousand years ago and what He might do. She needed to press into Jesus with her immediate emotions, her feelings, her words, her urgent thoughts, her fears. In the moment. Jesus incarnated is who she needed now–not later. Jesus temporarily was coming through Kalyn, and He can come through each of us. We need the Jesus that “every throne and dominion and authority and rulers” are keenly aware of: Jesus, the Beloved.

The Christmas story celebrates the beginning. The plan conceived in eternity before the beginning began is what the Christmas story announces. With the incarnation the Spiritual universe connected with the material universe because of One Physical Body. To change RELATIONSHIPS forever. In an encounter with Jesus each of us would become, so to speak: un-done and then–miraculously, re-done. Just like His death and resurrection. After listening to the story of pain and loss, Kalyn did the most unlikely thing for the abused woman–she led the broken-hearted mother in forgiving her boyfriend for his mean, destructive, hurtful behavior toward her.

In a way, she was truly getting rid of him. She released him out of her deep hurt, anxious thoughts and wounded heart. Kalyn highlighted and led her through the lies: she was not a victim. She could initiate change. Make healthy decisions with a new heart, a clear mind, and essentially because of a healthy relationship with Jesus. The Jesus way always begins with something that comes to us from Heaven: divine, complete, overwhelming forgiveness. The necessary heart awakened to feel again and see with renewed clarity and light.

Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” Galatians 4:6

Because it takes mercy, and grace, and courage, and faith to truly forgive someone who has painfully hurt us, Jesus must be in the very middle of our forgiveness. Isn’t that perfect? Forgiveness in our own strength does not work. It is called conceptual forgiveness which does not touch the emotions that are damaged. As we forgive after pressing into Jesus for our own bad choices, He lifts off our guilt, our shame, our anxiety, our distress, and the stuff that we cannot even articulate. Get this–Jesus, the creative source of forgiveness, is suddenly is in the room. We are then able to release our grip on others for what they have done to us. Move them out of our ever-present tormenting thoughts and fears. Forgiveness coming and going is the gift Jesus gift brings to us in the incarnation. He had to bring the explosive power of forgiveness to us from His eternal realm into His physical body. But the Father’s forgiveness was not conceptual either.

Jesus came to bring forgiveness, and He charged the church, His body (us), to freely forgive our most hurtful, mean-spirited relationships. Influence the world with forgiveness. Change the world one heart at a time. Model what it means to forgive someone. Show others. Jesus has to be in the middle of our aching heart to truly forgive. Without this gift of forgiveness we will be locked up for a lifetime in a prison with offences. The Christmas story is about reconciliation and setting the captives free.

We can only forgive because we have been enormously forgiven for behavior by a Holy God Who saw our damaging behavior as abhorrent, (but which we took lightly). He has an eternal plan for saving us and others. The Father sent His Son to experience the wickedness of darkness, the disgust of degradation, the humiliation of shame, and the ravages of sin.

What we hide, and carry inside of us, torments us…

Jesus was gathering it all up, carrying it with Him. “A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” Moving toward Golgotha with the weight of evil. He would be pinned to a cross to suffer horribly to demonstrate the Father’s love, His holiness, and His mercy toward us. The judgement and death was for each of us. Jesus bled out on the cross with a ruptured heart “feeling” judged by the Father. That is the significance of the Christmas story. Real love coming into our personal realms to change everything. So we would be captivated like the angels who fully grasped the context. If we are not captivated for what Jesus did, we may be guilty of what Isaiah 53:4 says of some; “We esteemed Him not.” Many didn’t, and still don’t get Jesus.

The Father sent Jesus to reconcile us. Bring us in. That is the message of the Christmas story. Jesus walked around in a physical body. God in physical form. The angels were shockingly stunned at how and what happened. No one saw it coming but the Godhead. Unfathomable. Unimaginable. Unless we get the revelation. Then. Everything changes.

For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Collosians 1:13, 14