The Christmas season is well upon us. Once more we are invited to ponder the significance of the season. Once again the question of the meaning of Christmas is set before us.
Of course, the coming of Christ is multi-faceted in its richness. The gospel is jam-packed with spiritual realities that can never be captured in one, single word or concept or picture. We cannot put God, Christ, or the gospel in a box. Faithfulness to the gospel demands a willingness to allow for the manifold richness of the testimony of Scripture concerning Christ.
Perhaps that is why Christianity is more than just the mastering of a body of concepts and ideas, of teachings and doctrines. This is suggested by the testimony of John’s Gospel that Jesus is the Word come in the flesh (John 1.1-18). The Word is the expressed will of the Father. The truth of God’s Word (his will and his ways) was best expressed in a living Person. The complexity of a Person best captures the exceeding richness of God, his will, and his ways. We may say that Jesus was the embodied will of the Father. In him we see the fullness of the Father’s will, the fullness of God himself. The life of Jesus is the will of the Father lived out. In him we see what living under the leadership of God is like.
What should this mean for us? Whereas we may master a body of ideas, this Person is to be the Master. In him we are called to surrender our will to his will, adjust our ways to his ways. It is not just a matter of intending to obey Jesus. Such intentions must lead to realization in our actual living (in the flesh). Author Keith Meyer put it this way: “Our intended will, our thoughts and desires to act as Jesus says we should, needs to become our embodied will. That is, our intended will is incarnated through training, resulting in habits of mouth, hands, eyes and body.”
In practice we become something like a replication God’s example when he expressed his will in the flesh through Jesus. But the difference is that our will must first be captured by the will of God in Christ, the Word. Once that genuinely takes place, our captured will should lead to a life lived that actually is in keeping with the Father’s will. For then it is no longer us living our own lives, fulfilling our own will, but Christ living in us, fulfilling the Father’s will—just like he did when he loved us and gave himself for our sake (Galatians 2.20).
—Keith Jainga