Are you packed and ready for school? Do you have everything you need for the year ahead? Most of us work through a checklist: uniform, laptop, pencil case. But what if I suggested there is something else that we need to pack? What if I said we need to pack the truth of Christmas? That probably sounds like I have my calendar mixed up; Christmas belongs at the end of the year, not the beginning. By now, the decorations are down, the tree is packed away (hopefully), and Christmas feels like a distant memory.
Yet the truth of Christmas – the reality of the incarnation, that God took on flesh – is not something we pack away. It is something we desperately need for the year ahead. We need it because it is the only thing that truly equips us for the struggles of the heart that this year will bring. John writes:
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14)
Jesus stepped into our existence. He came close. God does not keep his distance from us; the author of life wrote himself into our story. That truth tells our hearts something we deeply need to hear: God wants us.
We know what that is like; we want to be close to the people we love. I remember the first weeks and months of getting to know my wife, Anna. During university, she worked at Freedom Furniture, and suddenly I had a strong interest in homewares. I found myself browsing soft furnishings far more than I ever thought I would. I just wanted to be close. My kids call that stalking, which feels like a slightly negative interpretation, but that’s what love does. Love draws you into the life of another person. You do not just love them; you want them.
The incarnation tells us that God does not just love us, but that he wants us. He entered the world to bring us to himself, so that we could be close to him. What a remarkable truth: Jesus left heaven and stepped into our existence to seek us out. Paul writes to the Corinthians:
“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
(2 Corinthians 5:21)
The incarnation shows us that the cross was not an unfortunate miscarriage of justice, but a transformative act of love. Out of his unimaginable love, we are invited to participate in God’s own reality. We have been released from the sinful mess we have made and given a new identity, the righteousness of God. This is what we need for the year ahead. We do not know what lies before us, the struggles, and the disappointments but we can rest secure in this truth: He loves us, he wants us, and he has made us his own. Nothing we encounter in the year ahead will change that.