An older lady by the name of Mamie Adams loved going to her local post office because of the friendliness of the workers. As she did every year, she went to the post office to get stamps for her Christmas cards. But this year the line was the longest she had ever seen. As she stood there, Mamie struct up a conversation with the people around her. When the young woman behind Mamie heard why she was standing in line, she told the woman that there was a machine in the lobby that sold stamps. “That way you don’t have to keep waiting in this long line. Mamie smiled at the girl, who couldn’t be more than thirty, and said, “I know, but the machine won’t ask me about my arthritis.”
It’s the personal touch that can make the difference in a lot of things. How many of us like to talk to those automated voice recordings you get when you call a big business? When those things ask me what I want, I just keep saying, “A person,” until it tells me “I’ll get you a representative.”
The personal touch happens when you enter a room where everyone know’s your name. If the jingle to the T.V. show Cheers just popped into your head, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The scene is of a heavier set man opening the door to that bar, and everyone shouts, “Norm!”
The personal is something that is easily lost in our society of drive thru, delivery, and Amazon. So when we experience the personal touch, it means more.
It’s the personal that brings us back into our sermon series where we’re talking about the God in the Manger. Where we’re looking at several attributes of God and how those can be seen in the birth of the Messiah, and the taking on of human flesh by God the Son.
Last week we started off this series by talking about the infinite God, who embraced the finite. There is nothing, except the goodness of God that constrains God. God is all the omni’s: omnipresence, omnipotent, omniscient. However it’s hard to grasp the concept of God’s infiniteness because there’s nothing we experience that is truly infinite. We might sing of undying love, but in reality there is an end to all things. What is truly amazing, is that we can grasp the concept of the infinite restricting to the finite. Things like self-control shows us what it’s like when a person holds back what they could do. In fact, one definition of true power is the ability to not respond to something though you could. So we see in the Word taking on human flesh, the infinite God the Son restricting himself for a time to the finite, for the purpose of living, dying and raising from the dead. In doing this, Jesus opens the way to salvation for all those who would accept him.
This purposeful restricting comes about because of the second attribute that we’re going to discuss. That attribute is that God is personal. Theologian Wayne Grudem states that God “… interacts with us as a person, and we can relate to him as persons.” Another scholar, Erickson, writes “[God] is an individual being, with self-consciousness and will, capable of feeling, choosing, and having a reciprocal relationship with other personal and social beings.”
God being personal is seen throughout Scripture in things like God having a name, the fact that he interacts with his creation, and that God is treated as a being and not an object. We can see this in so many places in the Scriptures, but we’re trying to see this attribute of God being personal in the Manger. So I want to give two personal touches of God in Jesus that shows that God is personal in the Christmas story.
First, God has intended purpose in what is happening with Jesus. God sends an angel to Mary to let her know what is going on. Luke records the angel’s words, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you … Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. (1:28, 30-33)” To the shepherds, the angels proclaimed, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. (Lk. 2:10-11)” And to the doubting Joseph, the angel of the Lord came and repeated the words of Isaiah, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (Matt. 1:23.)”
God’s purpose was to bring about salvation for people. Non-personal things do not have personal intention. Sure a watch has purpose in what it does, but it didn’t intend to let you know the time. A car has purpose, but it did not intend to take us to the grocery store. But a person does. A person had purpose in starting a job; a person has purpose in getting married. Individuals have the ability to act in ways that have plans to be fulfilled. God is personal because he too has purpose in all that he does, and the coming of Jesus, the wrapping of the Word in flesh, was with the purpose of saving those who would willing accept God’s purposeful action.
In that purposeful action, we can also see another sign of God being personal in the care that he has. God sent the angel to calm Jospeh, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. (Matt. 1:20-21)” God showed care with Mary, telling her do not be afraid. God showed care in the calling of the shepherds, who were of low status in their society. At the same time, God showed care for Gentile astrologers from the east. In inviting the lowly and the high of rank, and both Jew and Gentile, God showed his care in the birth of Jesus for all people.
In an article from Lesley University, they quote from the Greater Good Science Center about how care, what could also be called compassion, or empathy, “… is a building block of morality—for people to follow the Golden Rule, it helps if they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes … It is also a key ingredient of successful relationships because it helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others.” Since God is the progenitor of the Golden Rule, we can see that he is truly personal, because he is not only compassionate with his care, but the source of compassion, which stems from his personhood.
Understanding that God is personal, is extremely important because if he isn’t, then we either have a God who is present yet is uninterested in our plight with sin, like the Allah of Islam who demands insane amounts of devotion without the assurance of salvation. Or God would be wholly absent from his creation, like the God of Deism, being indifferent of our sin, and so will not act against injustices, or move to give comfort. Yet the biblical God is very interested in what happens to his creation.
This means that he is interested in you and me. God desires a relationship with his creation. He walked with Adam in the Garden, he wrestled with Jacob, he spoke with Job, he called David a man after his own heart, and he sought humans as friends. God desires an intimate relationship with each of us. This is why Jesus spoke these chilling and life giving words, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. (Matt. 7:21)” These words are chilling in that if we do not know God and he doesn’t know us in a relational way, then we cannot enter into eternity. Doing signs and wonders isn’t the sign of knowing God, rather, it's loving the very things that God loves. Jesus summed up the whole of God’s commands in Mark 12:29-31, with loving God with everything and loving others as ourselves; to love God relationally and to extend that love to the people around us.
My challenge for you is to act on that relational love. In loving God relationally, I want to challenge you this week, that when you pray, to set aside your needs and wants, making them a secondary part of your prayers. When Jesus taught the disciples to pray, the prayer started out with God before it got to us. To love God relationally, take time everyday to praise God for who he is. I gave you two things today: God is purposeful in what he does, and as he does it, he is caring. Thank God for what he does, in both little and big things. Take time to focus on God, before moving to your needs and desires. Relationships are based on being interested in the other person, let’s get more interested in God.
Then after that, seek God to love other people. When you go out to eat, write a note that tells the waitress that God loves them, and then leave them a bigger tip. Let someone cut in front of you in the long lines, when you have a lot of groceries and they have one to two items. Do something for someone without the need to be recognized for it. Let us love others as God loves them. He gave the Son on our behalf, what is God calling us to give that others might know love.
Let’s start loving God, by loving people. If we began to love God and love people the way God created us to love, then the Gospel of Jesus would go out as a testimony to all peoples, and our Father in heaven would be glorified in us. Let us be his people, relationally loving him and others. Amen.
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