12 'Christian' Beliefs That Can Drive You Crazy by Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

Author:Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend [Cloud, Dr. Henry & Townsend, Dr. John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t Downplay the Incarnation

It was a difficult session for Carol. Her father had recently died after a lengthy illness. His death had been expected. What hadn’t been expected was what she’d begun to discover about her relationship with him.

For a long time Carol had told me stories about the kind of man her father was. In all of them her father was loving, caring, strong, and protective. She had evaluated the men in her life by one standard—her father. There was only one problem: Carol’s dad had left her and her mother when she was two, connecting with Carol only sporadically throughout her life.

So Carol had created in her head a perfect father. She’d embellished who he really was to protect herself from the pain and loss of not having had a father at home. Only after his physical death was she able to accept the death of the relationship several decades before. She began seeing her father for the real person he was—a troubled, self-absorbed man who really hadn’t made time for her. She had a deep loss to work through—the loss of a man who had never been.

Carol never had a dad to connect with—one who held her, played with her, and took her on walks. Having no picture of a real dad, she fabricated an unrealistic one and compared every man she dated with this ideal dad.

The fact that Carol had a dad, somewhere, was not enough to save her from deep feelings of abandonment and loss. She needed a father in her house, a father in the flesh, a father incarnate. This only mirrors the need that God sensed within humans: In addition to the fact of God in our lives, we need God in the flesh, God incarnate—the Christ.

The crazymaker that says, “If you have God, you don’t need people,” distances us from the man Jesus. It minimizes the Incarnation, a fundamental Christian doctrine.

A fleshy religion. Most religions detail how to reach God. You perform certain rituals, you remain faithful to commands, you live the best life you can, or you recognize the god that you are.

In Christianity, however, we don’t reach for God. We don’t find the pathway to God. He reached for us, he made a path for us: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). God saw that we were in deep trouble and would never be able to reconnect with him in his holiness. So he did the work for us: Christ paid for our sins on the cross.

In the Christian faith, God actually became man. That’s what incarnation means. God became carne, flesh, for us.

By becoming a man, God baptized and affirmed our humanness. He made it acceptable to be just folks. We don’t have to water down or transcend our humanity to be spiritual. To the contrary, to become spiritual, we must become more human.

By becoming a man, God showed that he understands our sufferings. He’s been there.

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