Oh my goodness! This morning, I was brought by the Spirit of Christ two passage of Scripture to an understanding of the Incarnation of the Son of God as an infant that was so encouraging. I pray it encourages you, particularly if you have given up on God and Jesus, or on the church because you couldn’t live up to the ethics Christians insist on. If that describe you, then this is for you especially. Because the fact is, no one in the Body of Christ thinks he or she can live up to those ethics, let alone pull it off, though I grant there are some discouraging souls in the pews of every church buildings who act or worse yet, think, they can and you are beneath them.
Before I go to those passage, let me say that the ground for our hope gets lost if we think of Jesus strictly as the only begotten Son of God the Father. That heresy has crept into the church in the past and perhaps it has again. When we lose in the infant named Jesus a human nature such as is constituted in our bodies, we lose hope. The “human flesh” side of us can’t live up to our own expectations, let alone those of a God whose being and nature is pure in a way we can’t really comprehend. But we can apprehend that this universal purity must be true of any being we would call God.
So, here’s is where hope for us human beings lies.
The first verse I read this morning is in Luke, which contains the Christmas story we most often hear about the angels appearing to the shepherds and the baby in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. But chapter 2, verse 52 records something about that human being in the manger we need to give real weight to: Jesus is not just the Son of God, but fully human. The one way his humanity differed from ours is that he was born “without sin”—the ethical pollution toward God and each other that we inherit from natural procreation. Jesus is a human being with a human nature created by God without human sperm and egg and implanted by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s womb in a way not explained to us. It’s the fact that’s important, though, not how God did it.
Anyway, here’s the verse: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”
This was a real human growing up just like we grow up. He learned from his dad, a carpenter, how to measure, saw, and plane wood just as you and I would. No I’m-the-Son-of God super power there. We only think that way about this verse when we forget Jesus was fully human.
Now, here is the passage from Luke that tied into this that brought such encouragement. It kick over the pail of evangelical milk that I had mistaken for solid food. It’s Luke 18:15-17. It tells the story of those who refused to let the children come to Jesus and and the relationship of children to the Kingdom of God.
I’d heard the passage preached as children have faith in their parents—that they love them and will provide for them—and so we, too, must have a faith to be reconciled to God and enter His kingdom. And that’s true, but readthis passage from Luke 18 again, with new eyes that keep in view Jesus as human boy “increasing in wisdom, and stature, and in favor with God and man.”
15 And they brought unto him [referring to Jesus] also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. 17 Verily I say unto you, ‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.’”
Only faith can produce a deep-in-the-heart belief that like Jesus coming into our kingdom as an infant, we come into his by being “born again,” the concept Nicodemus couldn’t apprehend. The “born again” come into God’s kingdom as infants. But here’s the good news for the discouraged, for the weary, for those burdened by the high ethics of God they can’t keep or gave up trying to keep: Just like Jesus in his human nature grew in wisdom and in favor with God and man,” all the infants born in His kingdom—that second birth—must do the same. That’s who the kingdom of God consists of—a bunch of infants growing to maturity!
Not up to the perfection of Jesus, yet? Join the Kingdom. It’s composed of infants, children, adolescents, and the elderly each providing to the Body of Christ was is needed for it to “come . . . unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). An adult who learns nothing from infants is infantile in understanding.
There are those in the institutional church that seem to expect everyone to be fully grown in Jesus, like they think they are. Don’t let them get you down. I suspect they are still only bottle feeding. I know better than to be like that, but too often don’t act like I do. I’m still more childish than I’d like to think. .
Jesus reveals the mystery of God pertaining to who He is and in relation to the world and all things. Still a child in your understanding of that mystery and the wisdom of God revealed in Jesus? The Holy Spirit will see to it that you keep growing, just as He did with the infant human being in the manger.
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