{Please remember I do posts like these from what I see as an every day person’s point of view. I haven’t been to seminary and probably won’t quote lots of fancy authors. I exist where the rubber meets the road and pour out my thought in that vein.}
Let’s do a little more on the ground work side. John 1:14 says:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (ESV)
The Message puts it this way:
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.
I love that. The Word as most of us know is Jesus. When God sent his son on the rescue mission of all rescue missions (eat your heart out Johnny Rambo), he sent him as one of us. I am sure that being all powerful he could have sent him in anyway he wanted (I know some theologies won’t agree with that, but let’s not go there. God is bigger than theology and we should never say he can do anything in only one way. That’s ridiculous. We can’t put limits on God.) But he didn’t send him as a super hero. Jesus was born as the rest of us are. He had to eat, just like us. He slept. He could feel pain and be tempted. He cried. He laughed at a good joke. While he was fully divine, he was also, mysteriously, fully man. That seems crazy, that God would take on our form, but he did.
John 1:14 is the definition of incarnational. Jesus came to rescue us and all of God’s creation. AND, as importantly, he became like us when he carried out the mission. He ultimately had to die as atonement. He had to live as we do for that to mean what it did. In all of this, he gave us a blueprint.
Going with assumption that we tend to execute “missional” in a weakened state, it is almost always because we are not being incarnational in the way we carry it out. So next I will talk about putting the two together for a more complete expression of the Gospel and the Kingdom.
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