He is with us on our journeys. He is there when we are home. He sits with us at our table. He knows about funerals and weddings and commencements and hospitals and jails and unemployment and labour and laughter and rest and tears. He knows because He is with us – He comes to us again and again – until we can say, It’s You! It’s You!
13 Dec 2019
For most of our lives, we are so filled with good things that we don’t have room for the best. While the sun gleams brightly over the sea of our prosperity, making its gentle waters glisten like diamonds, we find comfort in many things. But when the storm comes, turning the waves into dark, frightening cliffs which threaten to take us under, we find the most precious treasure of all, “Immanuel, God with us.”
12 Dec 2019
At the heart of the nativity narratives in both Matthew and Luke, is a simple fact: amid the struggle of a people who had longed for 500 years for God to act in the world in new ways, God came to be with them in a way that totally identified himself with us, as human beings. Amid the most unlikely of circumstances, to the most unlikely of people, God became man for the salvation of all people.©2003
Each year, as we celebrate Christmas, we rejoice in Emmanuel—God with us. Yet for most of the year—therefore most of our lives—we live as if He is not with us, except when we find him in those carved-out scheduled “quiet times.” But we do not need to merely settle for an hour in the morning in the hope of encountering the living Christ. If we truly believe God’s Word, that He is Emmanuel—God with us, then we should expect to experience Him in our regular daily lives.
It is wholly impossible for us to know what lies before us, but it is possible to know something vastly more important. A quaint but godly American preacher of a generation past said it for us. “Abraham went out not knowing whither he went,” said he, “but he knew Who was going with him.” We cannot know for certain the what and the whither of our earthly pilgrimage, but we can be sure of the Who. And nothing else really matters.
Anytime your emotions say, “God is not close to me. God couldn’t love me. God can’t use me,” then your outer man is agreeing with the father of lies. The Father of creation has told you, “My child, you have always been with Me, and all that is Mine is yours… I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you” (Luke 15:31; Heb. 13:5).
By the light of nature we see God as a God above us, by the light of the law we see Him as a God against us, but by the light of the gospel we see Him as Emmanuel, God with us.
I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book, and when the book was finished, He lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was briefly in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads, how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent and has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word.