Precious

I don’t remember who saw the activity on the monitor first, what I do remember is each of us speed-walking eagerly down the hall as we jockeyed to be the first to hold our new son that morning.  It was a Saturday and Traci and I had been up for an hour or so and Mikah was sleeping in.  He was about six months old, and even though we had just spent the past few months complaining about our lack of sleep, it now seemed odd not to have him up to care for him.  We had laid in bed enjoying our morning together, each of us keeping a diverted eye on the monitor waiting for one or two lights to start flickering to let us know that our baby boy was up. 

In these same first months I had become a master diaper changer.  I had learned lots of tricks and was even down to one wipe with the “messy” ones.  I think my best trick was the wee-wee shield.  This was done by opening up the new diaper and putting it down underneath the old one I was changing.  I could then maneuver the new diaper quickly into place over the top of our son in one seamless motion.  I had developed this process after my son, having felt the warmth of his diaper and then the rapid cold of it being removed, sent a stream of urine all over my hands, his new diaper, and the changing table.  There were many other frustrating times like this, which as a new dad exposed my feelings of helplessness like never before.  For me, becoming a father was one of the most trying times of my life, but also one of the most meaningful.  As a new dad I was often overcome with joy as I bonded with my son.  Such that at times I was left incapable of finding the right thoughts or phrases to express myself.  At these moments the word that came to me time and time again as I thought of my son was, “precious.”    

One dependable moment of peace in our developing schedule was when he would wake up from his late afternoon nap.  He was content, and readily smiled.  He cooed and kicked excitedly.  Naturally, there was one word on my mind, “Mikah, you are precious,” as I picked him up and held him for a while.  He has always been very energetic so holding him never lasted very long.  As I laid him down on the changing table I was struck again, “You are so precious.”  My tongue felt like there should be more to say, and I searched for the right words again to match my pierced and smitten heart.  Yet, nothing except, “Precious, precious, precious,” said through a chuckle and a smile.  A contented sigh and eyes wetted with tears—an experience my son would learn years later to name “happy tears”—filled the gap, which my words couldn’t express.  It dawned on me during one of these moments of bonding with my infant son: the Father must have thought the same thing about Jesus as He saw him newly born.  In some cosmic way I can almost picture our Abba holding Jesus as a baby with thoughts of how precious he is.

Jesus is God’s Only Begotten Son (KJV), the One and Only Son (NIV), the Only Son (ESV), his Only Begotten (unique) Son (AB).  The New Testament word from which “only begotten son” is translated, monogenes—monos meaning “only” and genos meaning “off-spring”—carries with it the idea of Jesus as unique, one of a kind, and special.  Jesus is the Father’s precious son.  We read in the prologue of John’s Gospel the uniqueness of Jesus.  He is the Word who was with God at creation and is God Himself.  He is the Life and Light of men, and full of glory.  The entire first chapter of Hebrews explains the uniqueness of Jesus as God’s Son, especially verses 2-4:

But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.  He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (ESV)

Colossians 1:15-19 echoes this same theme:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (ESV)

Jesus is one of a kind.  He is unique in all creation past, present and future.  There has not been, nor will there ever be another like him.  He is matchless and without equal. 

Jesus is the glory of God.   The end of John’s prologue says of Jesus, “We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only.”  Colossians speaks of Jesus as having all the fullness of God in bodily form.  Philippians states that Jesus in his very nature is God.  Also, in Hebrews 1:3, as previously referenced, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.”  It is important to note the writer of Hebrews is writing to an audience of Jewish believers.  So when they read the words “radiant glory” they would have immediately connected with thoughts of Moses, who, “Whenever he entered the Lord’s presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out.  And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, they saw that his face was radiant.”  The glory Moses’ face reflected with radiance, is inherit in the very nature of Jesus.  These verses indicate Jesus has a glory all his own, not a glory he reflects from another source.  The very essence of Jesus is glory; radiant, beautiful, fear inducing glory.     

Peter recognizes Jesus as unique and precious when he confesses, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  And later he was so dumbfounded with dread at the scene of Jesus’ transfiguration that he is basically speechless.  As Jesus rose from baptism it was clear to everyone that he was God’s precious and unique Son as they audibly heard the Father’s praise of him, “You are my Son, My Beloved!  In you I am well pleased and find delight.”  When the ground shook at Golgotha and the sky went black, the centurion watching over Jesus’ crucifixion was terrified and filled with awe as he stated, “Truly this was God’s Son.” 

A different centurion whom Jesus encountered during his time of ministry knew the uniqueness of Christ as the only one who could heal his child.  There was also a persistent Canaanite mother who knew Christ to be the only one who could heal her demon possessed daughter.  As well, the woman with a twelve year bleeding condition knew there was something special about Jesus, such that if she only touched the hem of his cloak she could be healed.  Life had brought these people to a desperate place.  They had tried every other option.  To them, Jesus shined as the monogenes who could solely give them composure out of their chaos.  Jesus, and He alone, is who they needed.  In the midst of their hurt His healing was the only solution.

Ever since the Fall, Christ is what has been missing.  Before Christ, humanity and all of creation    was the endlessly bitter winter in Lewis’ Narnia where it was, “Always winter but never Christmas.”  Before Christ we sounded like an off pitch harmonic line of music.  Christ’s resurrection is the melody that brings relief to our musical tension.  Christ is the warmth of sympathetic bedside manner to a difficult diagnosis.  He is the rest that finally comes to fitful hours of lying awake in bed.  To a bland dish, He is a mix of spices.  To an object out of focus, He is a set of glasses.  To bleary eyes, He is the destination to a night’s drive.  To a bout of seasickness, He is solid ground.  He is relief to anger, comfort to hurt, and love to fear.  In the ache of our sin Christ is a healing balm.

Not many places bring to mind the desperation for relief like the desert.  David, while he is wandering in the wilderness of Judah, describes the exhaustion he experienced from the desert in Psalm 63:1, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”  Many times the desert or the wilderness is referenced in Scripture and represents a weariness of soul, or feeling lost without direction especially as it relates to God feeling absent from our lives.  Many Christians describe times in their lives as a desert period; to be sure I have experienced my own.  But the desert is more than a place of wandering.  It is life or death.   

I love the survival show, Man Vs. Wild with Bear Grylls.  Here are some survival skills he shares to give some context to the life or death perspective the desert demands.  Make sure to cover your head and the back of your neck or else your brain will literally boil inside your head from the intense heat.  (This brings a whole new appreciation to Psalm 121, “The sun will not harm you by day.”  If there were an Amplified Survivalist Translation it might read, “The sun will not harm you [cause your brain to boil inside your head] by day.” Look for the new ASTB version in your local Christian bookstore soon, haha.)  The sun in the desert is so brightly intense that you can experience temporary blindness from it.  So it is important to protect your eyes with sunglasses.  If you find yourself sans sunglasses they can be improvised by tying a piece of cloth around your eyes and cutting thin slits, or rubbing charcoal underneath your eyes.  Maintaining your body’s water stores is the most imperative goal for desert survival.  So reduce exertion to minimize sweating and avoid traveling during the heat of the day.  Just make sure if you travel by night you do so with a heavy footfall so the vibrations scare off poisonous snakes and scorpions who also like to be active after sundown.  And, if you are Bear Grylls and you come across these critters then you can cut off the head or stinger and eat them.  In the intense heat of the desert you would think it might be a good idea to strip down to minimal clothing, however this would lead to a horrendous sunburn and more rapid dehydration from the wind.  Reptiles, birds, and mammals—in that order—can go the longest without water, so if you see birds flying overhead somewhere there might be water, and a rabbit or a meerkat are a dead giveaway that water is nearby.  To find water in the desert you have to be creative.  You can dig a condensation still, chew on roots and leaves of non-poisonous plants, or know the right places to dig for it.  If you find wet sand you can fill your sock with it and squeeze out the water.  According to Bear that leaves more than a slight “flavor” to your water (and since he is British then it would be “flavour”).  If you can manage to do all these things then the desert just might let you out alive. 

In the face of death, surviving the desert is not just a relief—it is liberation.  In the desert we have created for ourselves by our sin there is no amount of determination or ability that will get us out alive.  We have to be rescued.  And oh, how Christ has liberated our souls from the death of our spiritual desert of sin!  He has transformed the endless sand dunes of the desert to the waves of a refreshing seashore.  All of a sudden sand is not your bane, it’s an enjoyable beach.  Your once desperate and wandering life of the desert is now swaying comfortably from a hammock between shading trees, nodding in and out of slumber as a salty seaside breeze floats past to the back drop of waves softly rolling over one another.  You have been saved, and your circumstance transformed.  Only the monogenes can do that!  Jesus is the only true way from sin to salvation.

Not only is Jesus our only hope for our present salvation he is the only one who can bring that to completion in our future glory.  Romans 8 describes our future glory revealing the uniqueness of Christ as the only one who could completely rescue humanity and all of creation from the restless curse of sin.  “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.  And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies,” Romans 8:22-23 (ESV).  In C. H. Spurgeon’s commentary on this passage of Scripture he writes, “Creation glows with a thousand beauties, even in its present fallen condition; yet clearly enough it is not as when it came from the Maker's hand—the slime of the serpent is on it all—this is not the world which God pronounced to be “very good.”’ 

The current groaning of believers and creation is one of heartache.  It’s not the groan of someone lost in a desert fearing death as he languishes under the scorching sun without hope of rescue.  It’s the groan of one who has found his way from the desert to the beach.  Yet, it’s a beach upon a deserted island, and your heart groans to be home with family and all whom you love.  This groan of Romans 8 is of the believer who has been rescued and liberated from sin.  Yet, who still faces daily the scarring of sin upon his soul as the future glory of heaven awaits him.  Spurgeon continues to give insight into this type of groaning, “The man that yearns after more holiness, the man that sighs after God, the man that groans after perfection, the man that is discontented with his sinful self, the man that feels he cannot be easy till he is made like Christ, that is the man who is blessed indeed. May God help you, and help me, to groan all our days with that kind of groaning.”  This is a kind of groaning which caused Paul to exclaim, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”  Only the monogenes can rescue us to heaven!  In him alone is the hope of our future glory.

Jesus is special in his ability to make payment for sin by being the only one who can suffer under the full wrath of the Father.  At times we think we might be able to pay for our own sins if we can outweigh them with acts of compassion, or if we can feel guilty enough, or pay enough of our own penance.  It reminds me of lyrics from one of my favorite bands, Counting Crows, whose lead singer writes about his many mistakes and misfortunes in love.  He says in Angels of the Silences, after trying to make sense of a broken relationship where his girlfriend left him, “All my sins…I said that I would pay for them if I could come back to you.”  In a softer acoustic version of this song on a live album he really brings the confusion and pain of these lyrics to life.  Almost saying, “Just let me know what I need to do to fix this and I’ll do it; I’m desperate, don’t let me go, I need you back.”  This is the anguish our hearts need to feel in our broken relationship with God.  Yet, unlike the song there is nothing we can do to pay for our sins.  God’s wrath against our sin is too great.  We see small examples of God’s wrath expressed against sin in the Old Testament—once against the inhabitants of a city and once against all of creation in the flood.  The flood was God’s wrath against evil and sin from humanity up to that point in history.  On a smaller scale He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness.  In both accounts it is said God is grieved by sin.  He then exercises His wrath against sin with incredible destruction. 

Now, take those two instances, which seem great in our mind, and try to compare the wisp in time of those two occasions to the entire sum of mankind past, present, and future.  Try to imagine the grief God has for the totality of evil submerged in the heart of humanity, and the great wrath he has toward it.  This is the wrath under which he subjected His Son for destruction on the cross.  Just as God sent fire and brimstone to pummel a city, Jesus endured the pummeling of soldiers striking him as he began capturing the wrath of the Father against sin.  Then on the cross, Jesus was left alone to swallow the flood of God’s wrath.  And after he had contained God’s righteous anger against sin he declared the payment to be finished, tetelestia.  Only the monogenes can bear underneath that anger!  Jesus is the precious wrath absorber so that we might “have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” (Rm. 5:1).

Jesus is God’s precious son, who suffered under God’s wrath, so that through faith in him we might appear precious in the sight of God as well.  He did this so that he could assign his righteousness to us and bring us to God, (1 Pet. 3:18).  And we are not just brought to God as strangers, we are adopted as sons.  In this Jesus is unique to fulfill the promise given to Abraham (Gen. 12, 18, & 22): that he will be a great nation, that all nations will be blessed through him, and that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars.  This is seen through a review of Galatians 3:   

Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham (v.7)…So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith (v.9)…You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ (v.26-27)…If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise (v.29).

Romans 9:7-8 emphasizes this same point:  

Nor because [the people of Israel] are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned."  In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring.

God’s intention all along was to use his Son to make us his children.  He has always desired to draw us near and hold us close with his affection.  He desires to nurture us completely rather than for us lift ourselves to the idols of our lives with their fleeting comfort and inevitable despair.  He desires us to follow his direction as good children, not spurn him in rebellion.  He desires us to look to His provision instead of continuing to toil under the curse of providing for ourselves.  As his children he has removed our hearts of stone and given us a heart of flesh, which is sensitive to the direction of his Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26-27).    

Not only are we children with the privilege of God’s affection, nurture, direction, and provision, we are also heirs.

But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.  Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father."  So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir. (Gal. 4:4-7)

As heirs God has given us an inheritance with him in heaven; the promise of eternal life!  He has also given us an inheritance of abundant life here on earth while we groan in longing for our heavenly dwelling.  Both inheritances come through Christ and his Spirit by whom we are saved and sealed.  Only the monogenes could make us children and heirs of God!

The Father gave up his precious son so that we also might become His precious children. When I think of all the uniqueness that belongs to Christ he stands out as a priceless treasure, and I am brought back to thoughts of my own son who is precious to me.  I could never think of giving him up.  Just as in some cosmic way I can picture our Abba holding his infant son with joy, I can also imagine a time when he must have wanted to hold him again.  Though this time out of a sense of pain.  I can barely begin to tread upon the emotion that God must have felt when, at His precious son’s crucifixion, he must have wanted to reach through heaven and draw him back to himself.  To comfort the immense pain of His son as he cried, “Why have you forsaken me?”  If it were me, I would have sent the legions of angels, taken my son down from that horrible cross, and carried him away back to heaven.  But God didn’t.  Instead, “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,  in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus,” (Ephesians 2:6-7).  I do not understand God’s grace.  I am helpless to comprehend his love.

Sweetheart

For the month of my ten year wedding anniversary one of the best things I can say of my wife is that she is better than a good crop of wheat. Now, just stay with me for a moment and I will help you understand how that is a compliment. I had learned somewhere that the word in the Bible for husband originally meant something similar to a farmer or gardener. I wanted to know more about this and the first place I looked was my Bible dictionary. For Husband it just had a note to see “family; household; marriage” where it would give me more info there. I checked all those entries and found nothing about a word for husband that was somehow connected to a farmer. Fortunately, just after Husband is an entry in my Bible dictionary about the word Husbandman, which is actually the word I am looking for and it gives the description, “KJV term for one who tills the soil; a farmer. Husbandry refers to farming.” Great, I’m on to something now! At the end of the entry for Husbandman it sends me to Occupations and professions in the Bible where I learn a little more about the occupation of a farmer during biblical times. It also sends me to Agriculture where I learn a little more about what a farmer does. I also pick up some random info about olive trees—did you know it takes 40-50 years before an olive tree bears fruit, and that some of them are a thousand years old or more? As well, there is some information about a farmer who tends to a vineyard, which I will return to a little later. All of this is interesting but not exactly what I am looking for, as far as how exactly is the word husband connected to a farmer? The best I could find in this whole search was 1 Corinthians 3:9, which doesn’t use the word husbandman like I am looking for but instead uses a modern version of husbandry, “field.” So, husbandman is the farmer who tends to the field, and husbandry is the field that is being tended. At this point I have gone from husband to field, and I have a feeling that this first paragraph isn’t helping, so let me keep going.

In 1 Corinthians 3 Paul is addressing divisions in the church about some who follow him and some who follow Apollos. Paul is trying to reason with them that he and Apollos are just laborers, mere servants of God who brings fruit to their labor. So when he gets to verse 9 and states, “We are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building,” he is saying that we as believers are the product, the fruit of God’s work in our life—as if God is the farmer and we are the crop. Now, in my search for a connection between husband and farmer I have a spiritual version of this relationship. The next place I turn is my Interlinear Greek-English New Testament that has the Greek text on one line, and a word for word English translation on the line underneath. I find here that the original Greek word for “field/husbandry” is georgion. (Seen in this word is the root word for earth “geo” as in geography, geology, etc.) From my Interlinear I now get to my Greek Lexicon where I can look up this word and find other places where it is used in the New Testament, which it’s not, except for the occurrence in 1 Cor. 3. However, it is related to the root word of husbandman (georgos), which is used in a few other verses in the New Testament. Interestingly, I find that the word husbandman—the one connected with being a farmer—is associated with labor in 2 Timothy 2:6, and patience in James 5:7. Imagine that, as a husband I need to labor with patience!

Sweetheart, I want to labor with patience as I serve you. We have been through some really hard times; even times when we didn’t know if our marriage would make it early on. Thank you for your patience with me as I try to become the man God has for me to be. I want to offer you that same patience. You have my commitment to always labor for you and our marriage. I always want to be given over to the process of renewal and change that comes by the Holy Spirit in my life so that I can work towards being the husband you deserve.

For me gardening has been a hobby that I have enjoyed for the past eight years or so. I get it from my grandpa who originally sparked my interest in it, and who has an oasis for a backyard. My biggest gardening projects have been planning and installing the landscape for our new home, learning how to care for orchids, and replacing some shrubs at our old house with azaleas. Putting the azaleas in was the biggest outdoor gardening project that I had taken on at that point. Up to then it had mainly been putting in seasonal flowers and such. I really wanted to make sure that I got things right with the new azaleas so I spent time doing some research. I started by asking my grandpa who had a lot of experience with azaleas having lived in East Texas for a few years, I also checked the internet, and asked questions of the local plant nursery.

Sweetheart, I want you to be my biggest research project. I want to know what is special to you and what makes you feel special, precious and unique. I want to be able to make time just to listen to you and observe your life so that I know how to step into your world and make feel the most loved. I want to know how to speak love to you, how to meet the emotional and relational needs that are most important to you and draw you close to me.

First of all I had to wait—with much patience too, because with all the research I had done I was ready to get started on the project—until late fall when the plants would be least likely to suffer from shock. I learned they needed a certain type of soil and I would need to amend the heavy clay soil that is common to North Texas. I remember the hours of sweat and labor I put into tilling up the soil deeply so I could get a good mixture of all the amendments. I learned how to install the azaleas properly by breaking up the root balls a little, soaking them with root starter, and planting with a few inches of the root ball above the soil line. My grandpa was there of course to help give me some guidance, as well as my mom and grandma who all share the same enjoyment for gardening.

Once I got them planted I made sure they got the right amount of water and put together a small scale watering system for them. I made sure they got the right amount of light, and ended up needing to trim back a lot of branches from a large overhanging live oak. I also bought some specially formulated fertilizer for azaleas and read up on how much to apply and at which time of year to do so. From all of this, a few months later the next spring, I was rewarded with the most amazing display of blooms I have seen outside of a botanical garden. The six azalea bushes I planted had turned into spheres of flowers. The bushes were soft glowing orbs the color of amber, with hardly a sight of green because the leaves had been overrun with blooms. After so much effort into caring for those plants I was a proud gardener those few weeks that spring.

Sweetheart, to me you are more brilliant in your radiant beauty than a million blooming flowers a thousand seasons of spring over. Beautiful are the soft glow of the smile on your face, and the warm care of your tender heart. (You are also beautiful to me in ways that I won’t share publicly here ;) I want to make sure you bloom into the most incredible person whom God has created you to be. I want to continue to learn what makes you happy and fulfilled, and carry out the job of loving you like Christ loved the church. May I continue to brighten your life like our azaleas did at our old house, and like you have done for my life the past 10 years. You are more beautiful to me now than you were the day I married you. You are truly an incredible woman who fills me with awe.

I mentioned earlier that the biblical word which is translated as husbandman is used in connection with someone who tends to a vineyard. Matthew 21:33 recounts Jesus’ parable of the tenants in which God is the master of the house who plants a vineyard and leases it to “tenants” (husbandmen, georgos) to care for the vineyard. These tenants acted wickedly and beat, killed and stoned all whom the master sent to collect the fruit of the vineyard, tragically even killing his own son. This parable obviously points to how Israel and ultimately mankind has rejected God, crucifying his Son in an ultimate act of cold-hearted self exaltation. As I ponder the use of husbandman in this passage I understand there is no obvious connection to marriage, but I think the idea of respect and caring for another can be gleaned from this passage. We read in the parable that the master sent his son with the thought, “they will respect my son.” Imagine a different outcome of this parable if the husbandmen had respected the son and ultimately cared for their master’s vineyard in the way it should have been cared for. Perhaps, how we treat God is a connected to how we treat and care for others, especially our spouses. So, how I tend to my relationship with God directly effects how I will care for my wife.

Sweetheart, I want my relationship with God to lead my relationship with you. As I learn tenderness, grace and love from God I want to pass those on to you. I don’t want to rely on the spiritual reserves from my youth. You need a husband who is growing and fresh. I commit to seeking a faith in God that is always fresh and vibrant, and guard against a stale faith that isn’t pleasing to God. I pray that I will always be the spiritual leader for you and our kids that God wants for me to be.

Aside from these philosophical and theological considerations I want to examine the simple idea of a vineyard. There were lots of vineyards during the time of Jesus, and he used this parable because it was a common practice in that day for a wealthy landowner to lease out his vineyard to others who would care for it. According to my Bible dictionary vineyards had one primary purpose, to produce wine. Wine was considered a luxury drink, not for your common meal at dinner. The most common drink in Jesus’ time was water, usually drawn from a well or cistern, but there was something special about wine. It was served at times of celebration like the wedding in which Jesus turned water into wine. And the wine he miraculously created was no ordinary wine. It was said to be good wine, of the highest quality, which is typically served at the beginning of the feast when palettes are more discerning. The wedding was a special occasion in which sharing wine was an expression of joy in celebration. I believe God wants husbands to care for their wives in such a way that they add joy to the marriage, making life special and exceptional. Psalm 104:14-15 says “[God causes] plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man.” A wife who is well cared for by her husband will be like wine to gladden his heart, filling his life with enjoyment and pleasure.

Sweetheart, thank you that in the midst of a life, that at times can seem as ordinary as a drink of water, you have been to me like an extraordinary wine. Thank you for the rich enjoyment that you have added to my life. Thank you for sharing moments with me that became all the more sweet because they were ours together. Thank you for the full-bodied texture that you give to our marriage, for the celebration that you bring to my life, for the sweet aroma life has with you. You gladden my heart and intoxicate me with your love. You have made my life more enjoyable and full of meaning than I could have ever imagined. I love you so much!

   

The previous verse from Psalm 104 speaks of wine and food that man is able to cultivate from the ground. As a husbandman the main focus was to bring forth a crop from the earth to produce food in order to provide him with sustenance to live. This brings us back to the verses in 2 Timothy and James which indicate that much labor and patience is required of the husbandman to bring about a good crop. A good husbandman knew that if he took care of his crops then his crops would take care of him. In the same way with marriage a good husband knows that if he takes care of his wife then his wife will take care of him. She will be a blessing and a helpmate providing sustenance to the life of their marriage.

The Old Testament uses three words to describe the kind of intimacy spouses should have in marriage: to know deeply, to reveal, and to know in order to care for. I think this last aspect of intimacy is crucial because it represents a compassionate, sacrificial love that gives life to a marriage. It carries with it the idea of caring for or tending to the other, much like a husbandman will tend to a crop. Husbands, you set the tone for your marriage. You cultivate the atmosphere between you and your wife. Do you find beauty in your wife? Tend to her with labor. Do you find enjoyment in life with her? Look after her with patience. Do you find energy from your marriage to face the challenges of life? Act with mercy and compassion to care for your wife. Wives, when your husbands care for you in ways like this then give him your beauty at it’s brightest, give him enjoyment that makes every day a special occasion, and give him nourishment that comes from your respect. God sets forth a beautiful cycle for marriage. Just as He provides rain to make a crop grow He will also bless your marriage with fullness of life as you enter into this cycle of care for each other. May God bless our marriages to grow into all that He has intended for them to be.

Sweetheart, thank you for the past 10 years of marriage you have given to me. I am so grateful to God for the life He has allowed us to build together. You have given me three amazing kids, and have proven to be just as incredible of a mom as you have been a wife; I love parenting with you. I can’t think of any good thing that I have experienced the past 10 years in which you haven’t been a part of in some way. As I envision our future together anything that I would want to accomplish has you at the very center. My heart overflows as I consider the next 10 years and all that God has in store for us. I love you with all my heart, and may our love continue to grow in brilliance with each moment that we share. Happy 10 year anniversary, Sweetheart!

It's my 10 year anniversary today!

This month's writing piece is in honor of my wife on our anniversary.  We have shared the most incredible 10 years together!  God has really given me a rare jewel among gems in her.  She is the love of my life.  She is a blessing that makes every part of my life better.  Like yeast works it's way through the dough, there is not a part of my life that hasn't been touched by her and made better because of her love.  Here's to you Sweetheart!

Derelict

“How had it come to this?”  It was the question I couldn’t escape.  My entire life I had worked so hard to make sure that I would find myself at the top.  I had become the master of efficiency and mutli-tasking.  My goals had been set, I had defined the steps to get there.  I was being proactive rather than reactive, and all the other 7 steps of success.  I made sure that I knew all the right people—and what would they think of me now, to see me like this?  My goodness, I still can’t see myself like this.  I can just hear their gossip now, “I knew this is how he would end up, serves him right.”  I can just imagine all the stories they are creating, and twisting, and passing on.  Oh, and their sorry sympathies.  Those are more annoying than the gossip.  “How unfortunate, what a sad turn of events for him.”  “Yeah, that poor guy.”  Yet, here I am.  What a pathetic thing my life has turned out to be. 

Now I’m in the same place as all those other people I had judged to be just as disgraceful as I feel right now.  How many times had they walked by my car at red lights holding pitiable little signs, or come up to me at the gas station with some lame story about how they needed gas money?  I knew what they were going to use that money for.  That’s why I never gave them any.  All these people can think to do when things get tough is to go get another malt liquor.  I mean, I know what it’s been like a few times to run into some difficulties, but it just made me work harder, which makes it even harder for me to come to grips with where I find myself now.  Someone who works as hard as I do doesn’t belong here! Arrgh, I’ve followed these thoughts down a million different paths, and not one of them makes sense for me to arrive here.

How in the world can I be standing in line waiting for my first bowl of soup?  But this is the only place I could think of with my stomach turning in knots for the past three days.  Gosh, I’m so hungry.  So I guess it’s either this or let my stomach keep growling.  When it boils down to it I would rather be asking for this handout than on a corner asking for money, and I just can’t imagine going through a dumpster.  Wow, has the line really been moving this fast.  I can’t believe it.  Only half a dozen more people to go.  I can’t believe I’m actually doing this!  I can’t do this.  Maybe I should get out of line, but I’m too close now it would make too much of a scene.  Great, I’m next.  I don’t even think I can look at this lady.  I just don’t know what else to do.  Oh well, I guess this is it. 

“Hello, sir, your bowl…sir.” 

“Um, oh, yes ma’am.  Here you go.”

“I haven’t seen your face before.  Welcome to the soup kitchen.  You’re in a good place now, Sweetie.  God bless.” 

“Um, yes, well thank you.” 

This is all so surreal.  I really can’t believe that it has come to this.  But, you know, the way this last year has gone, I guess she is right.  Of all the places I could have ended up, I am in a good place now.  It’s just going to take some getting used to.

*          *          *

This picture comes to mind when I think of the difficulty within someone who is wrestling with their first experience of accepting grace.  Internally, it can be such an immense battle as the striving of our own efforts struggle against the taming nature of grace.  Forgiveness and grace have a confounding character.  As author Philip Yancey often calls it “the scandal of grace.”  God’s plan of forgiveness is so simple and so easy we turn our nose up to it.  We take our haughty spirit and determine, “There must be something that I can contribute to this salvation thing.  I haven’t done all this work just to be given something for free.  How foolish would I look to put aside all I have worked so hard for, all I have amassed?  No, I won’t have it this way at all.  I demand that my work be worth something.”  At that point God is sad to allow us to earn our wage, because the wage we try so hard to earn ends up being death.  It’s like the church at Laodicea who Christ addresses in Revelation, “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’  But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”  All our work toward happiness in this life is futile when the only labor actually required for infinite joy is to bow our head low and raise our hands high to freely receive grace.  In my favorite song from the band Switchfoot they sing, “In the economy of mercy I am a poor and begging man.  The currency of grace is where my song begins.”  It takes a poorness of spirit, a realization of depravity and our great spiritual need, before we can come to a place of accepting God’s gift of salvation.

We either try so hard to be good enough for forgiveness, or afterwards we try so hard to prove that we were worthy to receive it.  As if to say to God, “See, you forgave the right person.  I wasn’t so bad after all.”  Seriously, did we completely miss the point when we decided to follow Christ?  Are we still trying to justify ourselves?  Have we not realized, “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags?”  As the worship pastor at my church has stated, “Legalism on the outside leads to emptiness on the inside.”  What useless striving, what a pathetic mess we are sometimes, and for what—the favor we try so hard to earn is absolutely free.  As Paul states in Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”  And he echoes in Titus, “But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.”

To put it into a dramatically profound way, our struggle between grace and pride is like the friend of Sam I Am who just won’t try green eggs and ham.  “[He] will not eat them in a box.  He will not eat them with a fox.  He will not try them here or there, he will not try them anywhere.”  I can almost see the persistence of Sam I Am in the persistence God has for us through his Holy Spirit.  Leading us to so many points in our life where we have the opportunity to put stubbornness aside and accept grace, which through our old lens of pride looks as strange a dish as green eggs and ham.  It’s not until the waters engulf Sam’s friend and he is adrift at sea at the end of the story that he finally allows the thought of trying the bizarre food to penetrate his pigheadedness.  Many times our own lives require similar circumstances of being lost in a sea of misery for us to hold our nose, lift a fork and taste our first strange bite of grace.  Oh, but the first bite is a savory one, and its not long before our heart limbers toward this strange dish of grace wanting more and more of it in each part of our life.  We long to be washed over by its simplicity, relishing in its freedom—this sweet, “renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom,” as Titus tells us, “He poured out on us generously through Christ Jesus our Savior.”

Unfortunately, for many there is always a small reserve of self-reliance, no matter how much pride gets stripped away.  Like the phoenix—the mythical bird that would die in a flame and be reborn out of its own ashes—we keep rebirthing our same stubborn nature out the ashes of despondency, getting caught in a futile cycle of obstinacy.  What is needed is to allow the last embers of our old nature to burn out in the ashes of despair, and allow the Holy Spirit to torch a flame of new birth within us.  As it is with the phoenix, it can only find rebirth back to the way it was.  We need to find a new birth through faith in Christ, because, “if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, the old is gone and the new is come.”  As Paul also says in Romans, “count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”  Even as Christ himself explained to Nicodemus, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit…You must be born again.”

This new birth teeters on a tenuous fulcrum of faith and pride.  At times we can see someone being propelled toward faith by the circumstances in their life, only to see a stubborn refusal in their heart resurface, swallowing them back up into self assurance.  It’s as if the situations of life are contracting this person through the canal of spiritual birth only to have the womb of self-reliance constrict and stall out the laboring process.  We think we know what will make us happy and we dedicatedly give ourselves to whatever that thing is.  Only to find out, as happy as we thought we might be, there is still this vague emptiness that writhes in our hearts.  Our heart fidgets in its malcontent for but a moment—and there lies its opportunity to give itself to grace—but alas, it drives us on to the next relationship, the next materialistic toy, the next project, the next drink or pill, the next thing we decide is the right thing to make us happy.  For, our uncircumcised hearts tell us we can figure out our happiness on our own.  As Proverbs says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”

                                                                                            

I have fallen in love with the word derelict to describe what this hedonistic death looks like in us.   For a thing to be derelict is for it to be left or deserted, abandoned, and forsaken—and out of this neglect to become dilapidated and rundown.  Like a ghost town, or abandoned mine.  Implicit in the thrust of the word is to know that there was a previous brilliance, a sparkle of newness.  God has crafted us in his own incredible image, outstanding among all his creation.  We are a masterpiece born out of the height of his creativity.  Then in pride, to satisfy our own selfish desires, we turn away from the blessing and favor inherent to us from our original creation.  As we selfishly turn our back on God’s infinite joy in the pursuit of moments of happiness we become a derelict dwelling.  For, we are always a vessel being filled either by grace or by pride, in the latter of which we abandon God’s intention for us and soon become a ramshackle residence.

Derelict is a car at the junk yard covered in rust with weeds growing through the engine block.  You can look at that car and know there was some distant day when it had been driven off the car sales lot pristine and proud.  It is the ashes of a campfire having burned down from neglect over night.  While the evening before it roared, crackled, and snapped as the life of the campsite providing warmth and light from which friends huddled around telling stories and sharing camaraderie.  It is the house my wife comes home to sometimes when my attention has been on dinner or something else besides the kids.  The tornado of toys my three kids five and under can leave behind is quite impressive!  Derelict might be champagne gone flat.  It might be the piano of Beethoven out of tune.  It could be an off-season vacation to a beach in winter climate—no one is there.  A derelict ship is lost and adrift upon the sea.  In the hay days of the cotton south a tract of land became derelict when season after season the cotton plants would leach all the nutrients of the soil, leaving once rich topsoil to become infertile sand, unusable to grow any other crop from then on.  The American culture of slavery that ran the cotton empire was derelict in its duty to honor its own founding ideal, “that all men are created equal,” which is dwarfed to our Christian responsibility concerning our oneness in Christ.  (In God’s sweet irony, out of the African-American slaves came the one who would save the leached land of the south in George Washington Carver.  Perhaps the greatest mind that agriculture has ever seen and the one who discovered the benefit of crop rotation.)  Derelict is Israel after the Babylonian captivity when the writer of Lamentations mourns the life that the city and people of God once had.  It’s what Nehemiah saw when he returned centuries later to see the walls derelict and in disrepair.  To be spiritually derelict is to see in us a place where the fullness of God once radiated in the vessel of our body, and that radiance is instead replaced with an eerie emptiness that leaves our lives looking shambled and decrepit.  In pride we neglect the plan He has for our life.  Not that He has ever forsaken us but that we have forsaken him. 

Growing up as a kid my family took lots of vacations to the mountains.  My dad had a trail bike he would ride leading the way ahead of my mom who was on our four wheeler with my brother and me hitching a ride along with her.  We would get to the most amazing places.  Destinations that you couldn’t get to even in a four wheel drive vehicle.  And the scenery would be so incredible.  In all the scenery there was one common sight in almost all our off road adventures—a rickety, run down shack out in the middle of the mountains.  We could have been riding for an hour, several miles from any road and even further from any sight of civilization.  It seemed so out of place, in a creepy kind of way. 

To me, these locations always bid my distance.  As if there was some old life or vitality, which had died with the place and required the proper respect of a wide berth.  As a child who was given to imagination, and even more so to being afraid I was happy that we kept going down the trail without stopping.  Yet, for several minutes afterward any scenery of the mountain would be lost to me because my imagination would be filled with questions of who may have lived there, how long did it take for the person to make it, and why did they leave?  As well, my mind would play out scenarios of this house when it had been in use.  Perhaps there was a father who took his sons out to gather the lumber to erect it.  Maybe a mother who had just dispatched the day’s kill out back, which was now giving way to an inviting aroma filling the quaint cottage, with smoke from the chimney being pushed along the heights of the adjoining valley.  To think, a place having so much life and energy at one point in time, left now to simply rot in the elements. 

It makes me consider our own spiritual condition with lives so full of promise.  If we could only stick to the purpose that God has for us, to hold fast to His good work in us.  In God’s perfect creation we have fallen, abandoning the liveliness of His will to let our lives rot in the elements of a world full of sin.  To go back and consider my own life as it had putrefied in the elements of sin, selfishness and pride.  I remember that emptiness and the impulsive flits from one thing to another trying to bring back the life, which was only to come from a spiritual rebirth.  I remember how it came with sweet brokenness and contrite tears.  God had taken the run down shell of my life and placed His life into it anew, replacing the old wineskin of my life with a new one to have the sweet, full bodied new wine of His Spirit poured into me.  Where there had been only the faintest sign of God’s intended life for me He had now placed within me, Christ, the hope of glory, along with the promise that I might be conformed to the image of his glorious son.

In those first few months after giving my life to Christ I got my first Christian album.  It was the Jars of Clay self-titled album, and one song in particular became my anthem as I craved more and more of His renewal in my life.  Quite possibly the most beautiful lyrics of worship I have ever known.  I worship every time I hear it, and wept often, having brokenness still fresh within my heart.  In a glorious way God was dismantling my stubborn pride and filling me with the antidote of his miraculous grace.

I look beyond the empty cross

Forgetting what my life has cost

And wipe away the crimson stains

And dull the nails that still remain.

More and more I need you now,

I owe you more each passing hour

The battle between grace and pride

I gave up not so long ago.

So steal my heart and take the pain

And wash the feet and cleanse my pride

Take the selfish, take the weak,

And all the things I cannot hide

Take the beauty, take my tears

The sin-soaked heart and make it yours

Take my world apart

Take it now, take it now

And serve the ones that I despise

Speak the words I can’t deny

Watch the world I used to love

Fall to dust and thrown away.

(Worlds Apart)

The most beautiful thing you can allow God to do for your life is to let Him take it apart, and then let him build up for you a life in the image of his son, Christ, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.”  If you have never allowed yourself a chance to get past your ideas of how life should be done and your own attempts to create happiness for yourself, then my prayer for you is that you would open your heart and accept God’s answer of grace and forgiveness for your derelict life.  You can almost taste it now, no more striving out of your own exhausted efforts.  You can almost feel it now, the washing of his rebirth.  Do it now.  Put away your pride.  God will take the derelict dwelling that has become your life and turn it into a dwelling place for his Holy Spirit, transforming it to radiate the fullness of life you so desperately strive for on your own.  God can do it, you can’t.  He invites you to surrender the battle and give yourself over to His grace.

New feature for Determining My Steps

I have added a new feature for my blog so that you can follow my entries by email.  This helps so that I don't bother people with a mass email invitation.  This also means that if you would like to keep following my writing here that you need to sign up to follow by email so that you know when I post something new.  I only plan to write one piece per month so I promise you won't be bombarded with an email a day with updated posts from me.  To sign up for email notifications there is a box in the top right corner for you to sign up.  You will need to look for a verification email in your inbox and click the link within that email to activate your account.

Introductions...

I realized a few months ago that my faith had become really stale. God used something in our life group to remind me of how excited I used to be about His purpose for me.  Ever since then He has been doing something really fresh with my faith.  A few weeks into it the question that I couldn't escape was, "Whats my next step?"  Proverbs 16:9 has always been a life verse for me, "In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps."  So here I am with the hopes--with the need--that God will make Himself known to me and determine my steps.

Having observed that God had broken into my life a few months ago I began to reflect with the Lord what He might have for me.  My wife and I fasted, asking in prayer for God to show himself to me.  (The last time we fasted together God called me to counseling.)  I began discussing with other people what steps God might have for me.  Eventually, I began to sense a plan that the Lord was laying out for me.  Right now the plan is still very hazy, but I can see the next place where He wants me to set my foot.  This blog is one of those steps (among a few other avenues that I am pursuing).

I am a newcomer to the age of technology (I'm still not on Facebook, let alone Twitter).  So don't expect much from the layout; heck, my profile may never even get filled in.  No interesting text usages (I might use Comic Sans once to spite some of you haters out there, haha), no cool pictures.  This blog for me is one of the most practical of sorts: I needed to have a place where people could read what I write without me having to print off a bunch of 8.5x11 sheets of paper and hand them out.  Also, from the measly 20 minutes of research I have done on "how to start a blog" I think I have received the impression that a blog is supposed to be updated daily, or at least weekly.  My intention is to write one entry per month, and test drive this writing thing from which I have received some affirmation with in the past.  I like to put a lot of quality into one piece of writing, rather than just write a lot. 

What to expect...
That isn't completely decided right now.  A big part of the purpose of this is to see what I enjoy writing about and to try to find a style of writing that suits me.  To that end I'm not really committing to anything in particular.  I'm sure along the way I will have some pieces on marriage, my parenting perspective as a stay at home dad, or anything involving the Christian life that I become inspired about.  I think typically you will find something similar to this first entry.  I really enjoyed creating the flow of this piece, working to craft each sentence and trying to find just the right word or visual image.  I hope you enjoy my first entry.  It really was a time of worship for me every time I sat down at the computer (maybe less so when the kids would become distracting, haha).  I have felt absolutely elated and fulfilled as I have written it.  Please feel free to comment on my writing pieces...if there is a line or word that sticks out to you, if you liked the way I phrased something, or if you may have phrased it a little different.  Please let me hear your constructive criticism as well since I intend for this to be a growing experience for me.  And finally, if what I'm writing connects with you then please pass this blog onto others who you think would enjoy following it as well.  Many Blessings!

Immanuel

Our Christmas season was off to a festive start until I got the phone call that evening.  I had driven ahead of my wife to our small place where we first lived as hopelessly romantic newlyweds.  Freshly cut Christmas tree atop my two-door sedan, waiting for her to get home soon so we could put the tree up.  It was our first married Christmas.  We had gone to her grandparents’ house to cut down a tree from their large property. Did I mention we were hopelessly romantic? Oh, and dirt poor at the time so a free tree was great.  But hey, we were rich in love, right!?  

My wife’s voice was shaken and traumatized.  I knew as I heard the first gasp of her shortened breath something was different.  It was raining that night and the passenger side tires of my wife’s car had caught a small puddle on the outside of the fast lane.  She spun around a full three times across four lanes of interstate traffic, just past an overpass guardrail, and was now facing the wrong way into traffic.  Fortunately, she had made it all the way over to the shoulder of the interstate, out of the way of any oncoming cars.  Fortune on top of fortune, there was a police officer who was just behind her and saw her headlights frantically whirling around, who was then able to pull up behind her with lights flashing to help her get turned around and on her way home.  The incredible part of this story, if you haven’t caught it by now, is there was not a scratch on my wife or even her car.  I shudder to think how that night may have turned out different.  Instead of continuing on to raise a Christmas tree that evening in our living room, we could have been raising our prayers to heaven in an ER.  God was with her that night.

Even as I state that God was with her that night I grimace.  Not for her or myself, but for others whose lives are not unscathed by misfortune.  For those who have found themselves with prayerful moans rising in desperate hope to a God who they need to come close and heal their pain.  I know it can be tempting to indulge the thought that we found some divine favor that evening, while others whose lives are in the midst of seething anguish have entered into some kind of divine retribution.  Almost like you are the one walking off the football field with head hung low, having prayed for a win just like the other team, only to have lost to a last second field goal.  The question of evil is the most difficult theological question to answer for a loving God.  I can’t say why our lives only brushed by despair that evening while others get caught by it head on.  I can say it is my belief that there is no situation outside of the reach of God’s redemption.  And I can say even buttressed by that great hope it is still my greatest fear that the tragedy of my life is just around the corner.

It makes me wonder if Job was beleaguered by the same fear because his life was struck by the most dreadful of catastrophes.  He was afflicted to the point of wondering to God, “Do you have eyes of flesh?  Do you see as a mortal sees?”  Beyond these questions in Job 10, I wonder if I can almost hear his thoughts. “God, I know you see my pain, but how come I can’t quite see you?  The peace of your heaven would be such a solace for me.  Is your throne in heaven too far off to relate to my anguish?  Since your holiness is so set apart from me, maybe that is the reason you feel so far removed from the horror of my life now.  Perhaps you are so transcendent you can’t come close to my tragedy?”

The distance between us and God becomes so acute when we suffer and feel afflicted like Job.  Our need for the dwelling presence of God is so desperately felt.  It can seem that a chasm is between us and God; an infinite void of derelict emptiness.  A vacancy we can feel in our hearts when the reality of disaster descends upon us.  An emptiness that makes us wince from the sucker punch of sudden trauma.  We gasp, as if in some desperate way the void might be filled.  God feels so far away.  We feel so alone.  We long for him to remain instead of feeling as if he were removed.  It is more than hunger of a famished spirit and more than thirst of a parched soul.  When our suffocating pain tells us life is crumbling apart, then it is a gut wrenching groan of our entire being just to have God with us.

And then, with a seemingly unsuitable arrival, he was.  God was with us—Immanuel.  “‘She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’—which means, ‘God with us.’”  No one could have imagined a more curious arrival for the infant who was born King of kings.  What a peculiar processional of shepherds and barnyard animals to accompany his entrance to the world.  Shouldn’t his birth have been announced to the order of a great chorus with the blast of trumpets demanding the attention of everyone within ear shot?  Instead of being roused with necks craning to the tune of a grand announcement, the residents and travelers of a marginal and logistically unequipped town kept sleeping exhausted from a bustling day among a frantic scurry for its first census.  God was finally with us but without the fanfare, blending in with life as usual in Bethlehem. 

God, you are here. You have moved close to us.  No longer are you removed or far off.  The “compassionate and gracious God” who “passed by” with Moses is now grace and compassion incarnate, immanently dwelling among us once again.  Here in our midst you have come to partake in our pain, to share in our sufferings and to bleed for our brokenness.  As Philip Yancey said in Finding God in Unexpected Places:

In the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem, God who knows no before or after entered time and space.  He who knows no boundaries at all took them on: the shocking confines of a baby’s skin, the ominous restraints of mortality.  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” an apostle would later say; “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  But the few eyewitnesses on Christmas night saw none of that.  They saw an infant struggling to work never-before-used lungs.

That night he also took on eyes of flesh to see as we mortals see.  Eyes that would later weep as his heart would move with compassion for those mourning Lazarus, and for Jerusalem as he would try to share with the disciples that the punishment to bring them peace would soon be upon him.  Eyes, which squint into the distance against the last light of day in anticipation that there might be one more wandering child who has turned to come home.  When he came to dwell with us he took on the fullness of our humanity.  He saw life with the same eyes of flesh with which we see.  To be able to see the way we struggle with pain, fear, doubt, despair, stress, and temptation.  He accepted a humble line of sight to see how our hearts sink with heartbreak, how our hope deflates into despair, and how our calm gives way to calamity.  The immortal God adopted the eyes of mortality to see our pain and understand our struggles.

The infant Christ also assumed a heart of flesh, which would warm with compassion toward his creation.  Even as the frost of night invites the warmth of the morning sun so as to be burned away, so the crackling brokenness of our icy hearts compels his compassion toward us.  That he might become our “high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.”  As Christ stated himself:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
   because he has anointed me
   to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
   and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
   to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

To the harassed and helpless his heart moves.  To the sick his healing hand is drawn out.  To the blind his fingers unfurl that they might receive sight.  To those who are hungry his ingenuity sparks as he considers how one boy’s lunch might be multiplied to feed a multitude; as well, to all who hunger spiritually his throat clears and he begins to speak.   To those who were once far off his heart of compassion propels his feet to run with a ready embrace.  Ultimately, to our hearts broken with sin, his hands stretch out to be pierced that we might be made whole.  Our pain was imprinted upon his heart such that he would not direct himself otherwise except to the cross where our peace would be accomplished.  The sight of our frail humanity did not incite his judgment but his compassion instead, that we might be saved through him. 

One of my favorite Christmas songs captures the beauty of Immanuel. 

Fragile finger sent to heal us

Tender brow prepared for thorn

Tiny heart whose blood will save us

Unto us is born

So wrap our injured flesh around you

Breathe our air and walk our sod

Rob our sin and make us holy

Perfect Son of God

Welcome to our world

(Michael W. Smith)

         

Immanuel, you are here.  The infinite and holy God became flesh and dwelt among us.  You are the second Adam here to save us.  Here, to make us new, to make all of creation new.  You were born to live as a suffering servant, as well as a prophet, priest and king.  Here, as the hypostatic union of two complete natures of God and man.  Here, to cleanse my sin and bridge the gap between my utter sinfulness and your utmost holiness.  These are things theology tells me.  My soul, however, delighting as with the richest of fare, simply tells me you are here.  You dwell with my desperate heart.