God’s desire from the beginning has been fellowship. To be with us.
God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Face to face. When sin entered the world, that relationship was broken, but God’s desire did not change. Throughout the Old Testament His heart cry is repeated, “I will be their God and they will be my people.”
This desire is also found in the language surrounding the reason God offers us salvation through relationship with Him, that “they will see his face.” (Revelation 22:4)
That is the goal. Connection. Intimacy. God created each one of us with the need for connection, the need to know and be known by Him.
And then he opened the folds of time and stepped into our world as one of us. Jesus, Emmanuel, which means God with us.
With us. Not watching from a distance. Not a kind but powerless force hovering around us. With us, experiencing life in this broken world.
Jesus knows the pull of this world on our heart. He experienced every emotion that we have felt or will ever feel. And he has experienced one emotion that we will never experience—abandonment by God.
We often feel alone; I am not discounting that. But the reality is that God has promised to be with us and to never forsake us. Jesus willingly experienced complete abandonment on the cross to offer us peace with God.
Why is God being with us important? What difference does it make?
We have an enemy that works overtime to make us feel isolated, misunderstood, abandoned. He knows that when we feel alone and vulnerable, we are more apt to listen to his lies. We were made for connection and intimacy, so when we feel alone it is easy for our hearts to make this false conclusion: I am not known, therefore I am not loved.
Jesus is with us, out of love for us, to draw us into relationship with Him. In Jesus we are known, loved, connected—the very things we were created to experience.
Because Jesus experienced life in our skin, He is with us in our joy and in our pain.
Pain is part of living in this broken world. We feel pain on many different levels, and we usually work hard to avoid pain on every level. We avoid it by staying busy, numbing out on Netflix, eating, not eating, drinking alcohol, shopping, working, working out … the list is endless. We want to avoid pain so much that we even take good things and twist them to keep numb instead of stopping and looking our pain in the eye.
And the main problem with all the numbing that we do is this truth: We were not made to live life numb. We were made to push through the fear, look our pain square in the eye, and live life in full.
Does that sound scary? You bet.
But we don’t do it alone.
Jesus stands with us when we face our pain. He guides us into healthy ways of living and thinking and acting. His resources are not limited, and He will provide what we need to face our pain.
Jesus stepped from the perfection of heaven into the broken chaos of this world to walk with us. Our God is with us every step of the way.
– Excerpt from In Unexpected Ways: Christmas in Everyday Life