It's Time You Put God in a Box this Christmas Season
You don't relate well to Him because you think He really does have better things to do.
Your perception of God is He's up there and you're down here.
Your God may be too big. That's a hard statement for me, as a pastor, to make. I spend so much of my time enlarging and magnifying God that to attempt to shrink Him seems borderline sacrilegious.
It's not the parts of God that I can't understand, never will understand, that It's the parts of God that I can understand, wrap my brain around, that compel me to pursue Him and know Him.
But how does an All-Powerful, Eternal, All-knowing, Supreme Being who spoke the universe into existence by the creative power of His voice relate to puny us, humans? But really, the inverse of that question is the real question: How can I, an error-prone, fragile, human stuck in a body and limited by a very limited mind (in comparison to His mind) relate to Him? And the short answer is through the person of Jesus.
One of the many mysteries of the Bible is how God became a man. The Bible says God "emptied Himself" (Phil 2:7) and became human. He supernaturally impregnated a woman, Mary, who carried Him to full-term and birthed God in a barn. How does an all powerful God do that? How much of Himself did He have to empty before becoming a weak and vulnerable newborn baby? A whole lot, I suppose, but it is true. It's a mystery and adds to the miracle of the incarnation, God becoming flesh.
God had to leave His space and get into our space, our box. For the relationship to work, God had to reduce Himself so He could fit in our box. That's what love between two people is. It's a giving and submitting to one another for the purpose of fellowship, unity, oneness.
God is beyond our understanding. He is infinite and we are finite. Part of the mystery is although He empties Himself, puts the cosmic hold button on portions of His powers, it does not diminish His greatness.
God did not incarnate once 2,000 years ago but there is the miracle, again mystery, of Him indwelling us today, right now. As a matter of fact, He's quite comfortable living in our box.
The phrase, "Don't put God in a box." is actually an impossible request. Our limited minds, not matter how big we perceive God, it is simply a bigger box. Maybe it would be better to say, "Enlarge the box you have God in."
Php 2:5-7 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, (6) who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, (7) but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
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