He is One of Us, With Us! He Was and Is and Is To Come!

By Greg Albrecht

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned – Isaiah 9:2

Here are some quotes about the incarnation, the coming of God to us, as one of us, that always amaze me and give me pause.  May these thoughts lift and encourage you, with hope and faith, as together we once again focus on the staggering reality of the God-man, theanthropos, the foundational truth proposition that God has come to be one of us, and still is!

• The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers… Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.  – Frederick Buechner

• Remaining what he was he became what he was not.  – Unknown

• We cannot wait till the world is sane to raise our songs with joyful voice, for he came to share our grief, touch our pain, He came with Love:  Rejoice! Rejoice!  — Madeline L’Engle

• The birth, death and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will become untrue. – J.R.R. Tolkien

• A baby has become a king thousands of times, but once and only once did a king become a baby. – Unknown

• The Lord did not come to make a display.  He came to heal and to teach suffering men.  For one who wanted to make a display the thing would have been just to appear and dazzle the beholders.  But for Him who put himself at the disposal of those who needed Him, and to be manifested according as they could bear it, not vitiating the value of the Divine by exceeding their capacity to receive it.  – Athanasius of Alexandria

• What denial! What self abasement!  What self-emptying!  He, whom no infinitudes can hold, is contained with infant’s age, and infant’s form.  Can it be, that the great ‘I AM THAT I AM’ shrinks into our flesh?  — Henry Law

• Off to one side sits a group of shepherds.  They sit silently on the floor, perhaps perplexed, perhaps in awe, no doubt in amazement.  Their night watch has been interrupted by an explosion of light from heaven and a symphony of angels.  God goes to those who have time to hear him … and so on this cloudless night he went to simple shepherds. – Max Lucado

• Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world. – C.S. Lewis

• So into this demented world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.  – Thomas Merton

• … the Christmas message comes to tell us that our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God.  Our eyes are at fault, that is all.  God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment.  No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Every automobile bears on its license plate a number that represents the number of years that have elapsed since the birth of Christ.  This is a powerful symbol of the ubiquity of God and the indifference of the human race. – Frederick Buechner

• The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man. – C.S. Lewis

• Anyone thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.  – G.K. Chesterton

• On the one hand Mary was just a girl, an immature and frightened girl who had the good sense to believe what an angel told her in a dream.  On the other hand, she was the mother of the Son of God, with faith enough to move mountains, to sing about the victories of her son as if he was already at the right hand of his father instead of a dollop of cells in her womb … When we allow God to be born in us, there is no telling, no telling at all, what will come out. – Barbara Brown Taylor

• It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than Christmas, when its Mighty Founder was a child himself. – Charles Dickens

• God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings.  God marches right in.  He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them.  God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and the broken. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Mary Did You Know … that your baby boy has come to make you new?  This child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you?  — Mark Lowry

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