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Incarnation (Being Jesus in the Flesh)

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

—2 Corinthians 4:6

My thinking about the principle of relocation began because of a practical need: I was trying to raise up indigenous leaders in Mendenhall. My hope for the young people I was working with was that they would go off and get some education—something many Mississippians before them had done—and then return to our community and use what they had learned to benefit others—something few Mississippians before them had done.

This returning part was the harder sell. Once people escaped Mississippi’s crushing poverty and racism, they didn’t generally want to come back. I was delighted when God worked in the hearts of several of our young people to do just what I’d hoped. Dolphus and Rosie Weary, Artis and Carolyn Fletcher, and others studied in California and Washington, DC, and then returned to Mendenhall to devote decades ministering in the community.

Pretty soon my thinking expanded, and I started talking about people coming from outside the community to make their homes with us and join in the work. We started “indigenizing” people, as I call it. They might not have grown up in the community, but they made it their home in meaningful ways—buying houses, joining neighborhood associations, raising kids, starting businesses, and loving their neighbors.

Eventually, I realized that this strategy of indigenizing, which I’d stumbled into almost by accident, had some similarities to one of the great mysteries of the Bible—the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus. John began his Gospel with this amazing account: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1–2, 14). It took me a while to wrestle with this great mystery of God, the creator of all things, taking on the form of one of His creations. Paul pondered the incarnation too: “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory” (1 Tim. 3:16 NKJV).

I don’t understand many things about the incarnation, things that may be impossible for human beings to ever fully understand. But here’s something I know: Through the incarnation, Jesus entered into human suffering—both in the ultimate sense that He took our sin and God’s judgment on Himself and in the day-to-day sense that He made His dwelling in a human body with all its vulnerability to pain and brokenness. He wept. He sweated and prayed. He was beaten. He touched suffering people and power went out from Him to heal them. He did all of this to satisfy God’s justice—and to live out God’s love.

Here’s another mystery about the incarnation: God was fully incarnated in Jesus, but He also dwells in each person who has received Him by faith. When these human beings who carry with them the Spirit of God enter a community where people are in pain—when they, like Christ, extend themselves into the suffering of others—they are in a place to share God’s redemptive love. Vicarious suffering is redemptive. I’m not claiming that we have the power to redeem others the way Jesus did. But we become part of His work of drawing people to Him. What makes relocation so powerful is that it gives suffering people an opportunity to see and feel the deep love of God through another human being. God’s love is incarnated in us—and through us it is transmitted into the lives of others.

But take caution. Some people start talking about God in them, and then they take it further and start talking about God speaking to them or working through them exclusively, and then suddenly they are acting like little gods. Christ is in us, and He does speak through us, but we go too far when we make ourselves the prophetic word itself instead of vessels of that word. We can actually end up thinking it’s ours exclusively. It becomes an idol. Some people say, “I received the prophetic word from God and you didn’t” or “God told me to tell you.” God said, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10), and revealed himself to Elijah in the still, small whisper (see 1 Kings 19:12). We can hear God’s voice in the supportive words of a neighbor or the comforting words of a doctor. It is not about the person with the loudest shout. More often than not, someone is listening to their own loud voice, not God’s.

When I first came back to Mendenhall, people would come by my office when they discovered I was a Bible teacher. These people were Christians who wanted to be discipled. One in particular, Miss Johnson, had started coming to my Bible class and desired to share the gospel with others in the community. She told me about an experience where she talked to a boy who listened intently to her words. The boy asked her what he had to do to be saved, and she told him to go back and hear the preacher. But that wasn’t necessary at all. “Honey, you are the preacher!” I told her. The answer to the question of how to be saved is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. By sharing this message with others, we all become preachers of sorts.

When we realize that we bear God’s image and that He lives in us, we want to draw closer to Him—and to His love. As His love grows in us, it overflows to others. We feel more of His love for others with the knowledge that He bore our sins and the sins of the world. His identification with us and our identification with Him make His love through us go out to the pain of others. As we bear that pain, it becomes redemptive to the person who is suffering. Our joy is filled in the fact that we can identify and empathize with that pain. Our ability to endure that pain stretches. We take His cross upon us. His burden is easy and the yoke is light. And through this we’ve expanded our ability to carry pain. That’s why the disciples could say that they counted it a joy to suffer shame for His name. That’s what being incarnational is about.

When we moved back to California in 1982, we bought a house in northwest Pasadena where there was death, violence, and drugs. Crack cocaine had just hit the streets, especially in our neighborhood. We knew it was a rough area, but we didn’t know just how bad it was. Vera Mae began inviting the kids in the neighborhood to a Good News Club. We also invited some wealthy adults who lived outside the area to come to prayer meetings. During one prayer meeting, a young man from the neighborhood was shot right in front of our house. After the commotion was over, we went back inside and continued to pray. But the shooting not only left the young neighborhood boy dead, it also left emotional marks on my rich friends. Over the next days and weeks, they told their friends, co-workers, and relatives about what they had witnessed. As a result, our prayer meetings grew in attendance, attracting people concerned about what had happened and how they might help prevent such violence in the future. Everyone from professional baseball players to book publishers to college students gave their time and resources to make a positive difference.

Two of those people, Roland Hinds, and his wife, Lila, were among my and Vera Mae’s best friends and supported us in our ministry. Others included Steve Lazarian, his son Stan, and his family. Always willing to assist, they founded The Door of Hope, a family shelter. Donna Roberts was another dear friend who I still visit every time I’m in California. I recently preached at the funeral for Pat Myers, another friend I made through those meetings. I was beyond blessed to experience such amazing relationships birthed out of these times of prayer.

Living in that community and inviting others to visit our home became the spark for development. Others have done the same. I can look across America and give you many examples of people who have moved into a community and taken on the pain of the people who live there.

So how do we live in a way that others can see Christ in us but not fall into the trap of making ourselves godlike? The answer is in the quality of the teaching we receive—and in our own diligence in seeking out the truth. Paul told Timothy to “be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15 NKJV). Unfortunately, not all teachers rightly divide the word of truth.

There will be those who sneak around among us, twisting God’s Word and drawing out disciples to themselves. That’s why it’s important to carefully examine the things people tell us about God—and test those things against Scripture. Luke praised such testing: “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11). If the apostle Paul was not exempt from having his teaching held up against Scripture, our teachers today sure shouldn’t be.

We can also go too far to the other side though. One Sunday a young woman at church sang a song that just sort of lifted me. It spoke to me and touched me somehow. So afterward I spoke to her and told her how much her singing meant to me. She said, “It wasn’t me, it was all God.” I don’t think that’s quite true. Sure, it all begins with God. This woman is created in His image, and He gave her the gift of a beautiful voice. But she had to work to develop that gift; she had to decide to use it in a way that honors God. That was her contribution. So it was God working through her, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t involved. God used her voice to speak to my heart that morning. That’s part of the mystery of incarnation.

The mystery here is that the God of all creation has called us to be part of His redemptive work. This should be our greatest joy. To be used by God should be our deepest longing and desire. Knowing we can do something for God is an awesome thought. This is the grace of God—that we can be a part of God’s family, a part of the body of Christ. All we do must flow out of our gratitude for this unspeakable gift, for it is remarkable to think that He can flow His love through us (see 1 Cor. 9). One can have the gift of teaching or preaching or mercy or hospitality, but the greatest blessing is being able to share that gift with others. When Christ came down full of grace and truth, He imparted those gifts onto us. To live incarnationally means that we also continue to give these gifts away in order to edify the body of Christ.

I believe that the human dimension of God’s work is very important. It’s not that He couldn’t accomplish anything He wanted to do without us, but He chooses to use what Paul called earthen vessels: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7 NKJV). This is what the young singer was probably trying to express, and I appreciate that. The power is of God. We are not the main force at work, yet we are involved. We are present. God uses us in one another’s lives.

At a recent conference some of the young people I had met tried to convince me that they didn’t really need a preacher. They’re frustrated with traditional church leadership but believe in the priesthood of believers, which is all well and good. But they prefer a virtual church over a traditional one.

I told them, “That’s going to be weak, because it’s going to miss the incarnation. It will not have a human touch.”

The writer of Hebrews gave us this exhortation: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb. 10:24–25). That active presence of other believers contributes to God’s work within us. Again, it’s not that God needs us to complete what He is doing—but He allows that human dimension to be a part of His redemptive work. We are so quick, as human beings, to get our salvation and then make it personal. It’s all about Jesus and me. What would happen if we organized with the expectation that God is going to use us in one another’s lives—if we recognized the importance of those around us to our own spiritual growth?

Now let’s get back to relocation, which is a specific kind of incarnation. Relocation is a way for us to enter into the pain of the people God has called us to serve. This idea of calling is important. I think God calls us in general ways and specific ways. In general, we’re all called to make disciples. Then it can get a little more specific. Paul was called to carry the good news to the gentiles. That was still a pretty sweeping call. Anyone who wasn’t a Jew was a gentile, so that was a lot of people. Paul couldn’t go to all of them, so he had to narrow his focus. He knew his overall calling, so everything he did tied into that.

Then sometimes God would be even more specific:

When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. (Acts 16:7–10)

The key, of course, is honing our skills in terms of listening to God’s voice—that’s how we can discern His call on our lives at different levels. Throughout Scripture, we read about God’s concern for people who are vulnerable or suffering: the poor, the widows and orphans, the foreigners in the land, and so on. All Christians should feel a sense of calling to where there is pain in our society. Then if we hear something more specific from God, perhaps that requires some urgency, we should be willing to go to a different place. Maybe the call is like Paul’s and it’s about a certain group of people—the homeless, prisoners, people with AIDS, or whomever. Then our geographic location might not matter so much. The important thing would be to go where we can be incarnational with the particular type of people God has called us to reach.

Something I’m coming to believe is that God will carry out those things He is concerned about. If I have a will to obey Him by doing something in an area He is concerned about, He will get me to the place He wants me to be. It may take some time, and the journey may take me through several places along the way. Moses took forty years to get the Israelites to the place where God had called them to go. Moses was concerned at the beginning of that journey about how he would know that God was with them. He didn’t want to go without God’s presence. “And God said, ‘I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain’” (Exod. 3:12). That’s kind of a hard thing. The only way for Moses to know that God was with him was to finish the task God had called him to do—that would be the sign.

So when we say yes to God, sometimes we have to grow to believe He is with us like He promised—even if there is no sign of His presence until later. When we finish our task—when we arrive at that place He wants us to be—then we can see how much of a grace act it was for Him to bring us there. So in a sense, obedience opens up the grace. When we have the will to obey God, He affirms that and opens up His grace even more to us.

It fills me with joy to have many ministry friends who have grabbed ahold of this idea and live it out beautifully by living and serving in inner-city communities. I think if you ask any of them, they will say that relocation has been the most important element of their ministry and development. They will probably tell you that they’ve received more than they’ve given during all their years of loving hurting neighbors.

In recent years, groups like InnerCHANGE (founded by John Hayes), Word Made Flesh (directed by Leroy Barber), and the Simple Way (Shane Claiborne’s community) have formed to minister incarnationally in suffering communities around the nation and world. One of many wonderful things I’ve noticed about these groups is that they also embody the redistribution idea—they call people to live at the level of others in the community, so that extra resources can be shared. They’re challenging people to give up some things so they’re able to better share their lives and their wealth with people who need it.

I’ve been thinking recently about God’s judgment—and how it usually fell on the Israelites during their more prosperous times. And even today, when God’s people have more wealth—and when they use that wealth to satisfy themselves by living lavishly—that’s generally when His judgment comes. I’ve always had a great sense of urgency in terms of reaching out to the poor. More and more, though, I’m developing an urgent concern for the wealthy. Relocation and redistribution aren’t just for the benefit of those who receive the human and economic resources of people coming into the community. They are for the benefit of those who choose not to hoard the resources they have—who decide instead to forgo some of those material things and come to live next to and eat with and know the people God has called them to love.

God does not necessarily call everyone to relocate into a poor community, though He wants us all to be a blessing to the poor, have a special love for them, and utilize our resources for them. He calls us to be good stewards of the resources He has entrusted to us and to help both the rich and the poor to realize it is more blessed to give than to receive.

John McGill, a great friend of mine and successful businessman in the California food industry, helped me so much in the early days of my ministry. He didn’t give me large amounts of money, but he did give me his time, visiting me when I was in Mississippi. And he taught me something I will always remember. He said,

John, we are workers and brothers and sisters together in this ministry, and God has me serving the needs of the people in Southern California in terms of food and has given me a good return on my stewardship and investment. The biggest deal here is that I work hard, and I encourage my workers to work hard. My money is a part of my stewardship. Really, I’m stewarding my energy and my time. We all have the same amount of time, and I use mine and I sweat—and that’s my blood. So when I’m giving you money and sharing my wealth with you, I’m really sharing my blood and sharing my life.

My good friend Howard Ahmanson does the same. I’m always telling him what he ought to be thinking about and doing, and he always comes back to me saying, “John, you have the same amount of time as I have.” Time, as well as wealth, must be stewarded in a way that is pleasing to God.

But the truth is that there is enough time and enough wealth to go around. The people in the churches every Sunday outnumber the people who are on the streets and the number of people on welfare. If the church took up the responsibility of caring for the poor, of living incarnationally, of participating in the unspeakable gift of giving, our world would look much different from the way it does today. Justice is a stewardship issue, caring for the poor is a stewardship issue, loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is a stewardship issue. We have the resources, but our priorities aren’t there yet. If I could call the church to task on one more thing in the years I have left, it would be to start stewarding our resources in a way that adheres to the will of God and is in line with His kingdom. We can look to the apostle Paul’s example: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). I long to see the church give up its power and privilege the way Jesus did when He came to earth to give us the greatest of gifts. Now that would be incarnational living.