Incarnating God’s Greatness
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. Isaiah 40:28–31
Jesus came as God in the flesh, the incarnation. When he ascended to the father he handed off that incarnational responsibility to us, the Church. God’s incarnational intent for each of us is to be missionaries in every context that he has placed us in, to be Kingdom agents bringing healing to our world. But what does that look like? How do we start?
Pastor Todd Hunter in his book Christianity Beyond Belief: Following Jesus for the Sake of Others defines our role as Christians as one where we are:
Cooperative friends of Jesus seeking to live lives of creative goodness for the sake of the world by the power of the holy spirit . . . where the language of cooperative friends acts as a shorthand, cribsheet, CliffsNotes way to understand our story. It is whole-life and active. It goes beyond mere beliefs or church life. It is centered on God. As Jesus’ cooperative friend, I live in alliance with what is already going on. I wake every day in an ongoing story. And in this story I play the role of God’s cooperative friend.
What is the story that you are currently living? What might it look like to live it, moment by moment, as Jesus’ cooperative friend? How would this awareness change the way you interact with your family, your co-workers, teachers, or the strangers beside you at the store or alongside you on the highway? How might this posture bring into focus people around you that might otherwise go unseen? What might you do with what you see? Lot’s of questions, lots of opportunities, yet all lived in the reality of who it is that we are cooperating with, who it is that calls us friend and that releases us into mission.
We do not live this incarnating life in our own strength, but in the strength of him who does not grow tired, he who knows more than we can ever understand or know. Our job is to get up and join in what he is doing, with the trust that as we do so, God will give us his strength so that we might soar like eagles, because our hope is not in our selves or our abilities, but in him.
Peace, hope and love
Doug
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