Why Jesus Came

Richard Rohr, a Roman Catholic priest, says that Jesus identified his message with what he called the coming of the “reign of God” or the “kingdom of God,” whereas we have often settled for the sweet coming of a baby who asked little of us in terms of surrender, encounter, mutuality or any studying of the Scriptures or the actual teaching of Jesus.

I invite you, as we move from Christmas into a new year, to consider that the suffering, injustice and devastation on this planet are too great to settle for any infantile gospel or to let your faith stop with a baby Jesus. What we call the Incarnation, God becoming a human being, becoming one of us, strikes directly at the heart of evil and corruption in the world. The Creator of the universe came to us as a helpless baby. He lived a perfect life of perfect love. When he died, he died taking on our sin and exposing the evil of our world. Then, the end of the story was not defeat. It was the defeat of death when he rose up from the grave and gave his power to the coming of the kingdom of God into our world and into our lives.

Jesus lives in us and invites us to live in the kingdom growing in our ability to love others and to work with him to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

Thank you for doing justice and loving kindness by giving to our Global Missions Offering. We gave more than our goal of $700. Now, as we enter into the New Year, let’s give more than our 2011 goal of $150,000 for our ministries here at New Hope.

Walk in the Light

A passage from the Bible has stayed on my mind lately. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1John 1:6-7). These words came into my mind recently when someone trusted me enough to tell me some truth. That truth telling allowed me more deeply into this person’s life. I felt honored that I had been trusted. I felt as if I was being invited into a personal journey

How did I feel toward that person after that revealing conversation? I felt more like a friend and a fellow struggler in life. What the Bible says in the First Letter of John became a reality: “We have fellowship with one another.” God has shown us in Jesus how to walk in the light. We don’t have to be afraid of bearing each other’s burdens. We can tell the truth about ourselves and increase the love that flows between us.

This truth from John’s letter is also challenging us to see that this is how we get our sins forgiven. We have to tell the truth about them. That is what it means to walk in the light as God is in the light. When we tell the truth to God and to a trusted person who can love us, we invite God to make us clean and get the sin out of our lives.

That is what I love about living life with other followers of Christ. We can tell each other the truth, come out of the darkness and walk in the light and we get to live a shared life in which love for God and love for each other grows and grows.

I’m glad that we members of New Hope are experiencing a shared life with each other. May our light and love increase as we celebrate the birth of the One whose life is light. This is the way the Gospel of John says it: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5).

Let’s learn some new truth about walking in the light this Christmas season. Tell your truth to God and to a trusted person. Then you will walk in the light of Christ and know fellowship and forgiveness.