By: Doug Lane, Lead Pastor at Zion Community
DC Talk. Winter of 2002. Indianapolis, Indiana.
As a teenager, I loved listening to DC Talk.
It started when I won their CD in youth group during a Bible Sword Drill. I did not have my own CD player but I did have the family computer with a disc drive!
I would listen to that CD for hours on end, singing along as loud as possible, much to my family’s dismay.
After several years of listening to their recorded music, I went to a DC Talk concert where I discovered there is nothing quite like experiencing your favorite musician or band live and in the flesh.
It. Was. Awesome.
The author of Hebrews begins his letter to the church not with formal greetings like Paul does, but with a brief history of how God has chosen to speak to His people.
In the Garden of Eden, God walked with Adam and Eve. After the fall, God spoke through judges, priests, prophets, and kings. Ultimately, God chose to step into creation as Jesus, the Word. God in the flesh. What a beautiful gift.
There was something very special that happened when I saw my favorite band perform live that night.
I realized that the voices projecting from my computer speakers were real people with real stories and life experiences just like my own.
And so it is with Jesus. He is God in the flesh, with real stories and life experiences, some of which are just like our own.
When we think about the gift of Jesus, we are often tempted to move quickly from the story of His birth to focus on Him dying on the cross for our sins.
In these final days of Advent, let us take time to celebrate that in Jesus, we have the perfect example of what it is to be human.
God chose to communicate to us by becoming one of us and encountering many of the same situations we go through.
We may not find every specific situation we face in Scripture, but through the teaching, example, and Lordship of Jesus we have all that we need to live as his faithful followers no matter what comes our way.
What love! That, as Hebrews 1:3 says, “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word.”
Thanks be to God!