Hope Now: 27 Days to Peace, Healing, and Justiceਨਮੂਨਾ

Hope is "incarnational"

Hope starts with Jesus. The first and most powerful thing Jesus ever did was invade our space, to break into human history. God decided to come very near through Jesus. He thought about us. He knew we needed hope. Then he came to us.

It’s hard to provide hope from a distance.

When the Gospel writer John writes, “The Word became flesh,” (John 1:14 NIV), it’s critical to see that shows that hope, in the form of a person, came near. He became flesh and blood. He became human. He was God in human form – and pitched his tent among us.

When Jesus shows up, he brings hope.

Who Jesus is

To understand hope as incarnational, we have to understand who Jesus is. Jesus is God, and God is passionately interested in a personal relationship with you. He wants you to know him, and he wants you to learn and fulfill his purpose for your life. Any effort to know who Jesus is includes an understanding of what he did while on Earth.

What Jesus did

God’s kingdom, through Jesus, was launched in the first century. What Jesus was all about framed what he did.

Jesus was all about establishing God’s rule on Earth. But the way he went about bringing this truth to life was unique. Jesus set up his earthly kingdom as a servant (Mark 10:45). He worked miracles not to show his authority but to point to the reality of the kingdom already amid Israel. He taught in order to reveal what God’s kingdom meant and to say it was present and ongoing.

Beyond teaching, Jesus practiced what he preached and taught. He did so much in his life, but even more through his death.

The death of Jesus on a Cross started a “revolution” according to N.T. Wright. Jesus lived a revolutionary life, presented revolutionary teachings and died a revolutionary death. Would it not make sense that what he commanded his followers to do was also revolutionary, even countercultural?

Questions for Reflection:

• In your own words, who is Jesus?
• What did he do?