Daily Devotion

Isaiah 7:14
"All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means 'God is with us')." 

God With Us

When the virgin gave birth to this Son, Immanuel was at last present among us, yet in so many ways he was still hidden from us. Romans 11:33 says, "Oh, how great are God's riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways!"

Have you ever wondered why God would want to live among us and even within us, when we cannot fully comprehend him?

If you've ever gone to live in a foreign country, you've known the temporary loneliness and frustration of living among people who can't fully understand you. In spite of the hardship, most likely you endured because you knew that one day you would eventually be fully understood.

1 Corinthians 13:12 promises a day when we will no longer see through imperfect eyes: "Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely."

Could it be that Immanuel—God With Us—is looking forward to that day just as much as we are, that day when we see him with perfect clarity and know him completely?

The Word Became Flesh

John 1:1-5,10-12,14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus. When he came into the world as a baby, he was sent from heaven to earth to become the living expression of the Father God. This was the gift he brought. His very life would speak to us everything that God ever wanted to say to us about himself. What an amazing gift!

One day we were discussing this passage in John 1 on the Christianity forum. As we considered the enormity of this gift, we were struck by the phrase, "the living expression." One member of the forum, G. Anthony Buchsbaum, marveled, "The living expression ... for that speaks of nothing less than the living Christ encountering us in our present circumstances. He is the personal Word of God to us. Through Christ, God continues to communicate himself to us through the personal revealing of his Son. In the person of Christ, all wisdom and knowledge is to be found. Yet the Father must reveal the Son to us so that the Son will in turn reveal the Father."

Buchsbaum continued, "Our knowledge has always been two-dimensional in nature. Yet the knowledge of God presented to us through his 'living expression' takes on a three-dimensional form, for it addresses the entire person, from head to toe. It not only informs us, it transforms us."

Have you ever stopped to consider this concept? God so intimately wanted to communicate with you, that he sent Jesus to speak forth the living demonstration of his heart. As you dwell on Jesus Christ and his Word, realize that God is still speaking his "living expression" to transform you, not just this Christmas season, but every day.