Incarnational Living - December 2020
Incarnational Living
I’m tired of Zoom. I’m tired of online church. I’m tired of experiencing part of people (visual and auditory). I need to feel people. I need to smell them. I need the energy that radiates in a room filled with people in my Christian family. I need life-sized, in-person presence. Don’t you?
God made us with bodies and called it good. We need to be in physical proximity to other bodies made in God’s image sharing the tangible expression of Jesus in our midst. The Gospel cannot be reduced to content which can be shared in print, audio, or even video forms. Thank God we have the technology to do things virtually, but the gap between virtual and actual is wider than we knew before COVID-19.
But this shouldn’t be a surprise for people who believe in incarnation and resurrection. We are those who know that bodies matter. God isn’t just an idea. He is a presence. He took on a body to become real to us, something we should be thinking a lot about this month. He inhabits bodies by his Spirit. He decided to disciple the world through people in bodies, not in recorded or digital forms. Why, because he made us to need other people to become the people he planned for us to be.
That is why ministry requires presence. That is why mission must always include people who know Jesus going to the places where people who don’t know Jesus live.
Only when the Gospel takes on incarnational form, moves into the neighborhood, and lives out a cruciform model along with proclaiming the good news can the world be won to Christ. This is why we need missionaries and why we must pray for them.
Pray that those sent to be Christ to the lost in the MedRim, around the Bay of Bengal, around the world, or around the corner from you will be able to faithfully live an embodied Gospel that brings hope and life to bodies deprived of God’s Spirit until now.
Please pray that the disciple-makers in the MedRim and Bengal will find ways to be present with people in the midst of a pandemic. Pray they will be wise and brave.
Pray they will find ways to serve that demonstrate God’s love without putting others at risk.
Pray that God will use their presence to make himself known to people who have little to no understanding of the God revealed to us in Jesus.
Pray that God will raise up servant leaders with heart.
