Emmanuel

God With Us

Emmanuel— God with us. It took me so many years to understand the depth those words hold. God cares about us so deeply despite our blatant rebellion that he made a way to be with us— to have a relationship with us. God came to dwell with us so that someday we can forever dwell with him.

We’re quick to forget this life-altering miracle. Distractions come in many forms, and recently I’ve become aware of one that disguises itself as something noble but will decay our love for God if we let it. As Christians, it’s possible to become so invested in learning about God that we overlook our relationship with him.

This summer, when it felt like everything was changing at once, I found a level of stability in the pursuit of intellectual knowledge about God. The knowledge gave me something solid to hold onto. As I spent more and more time learning, it became increasingly easy to overlook the relational side of Christianity. Sometimes in the pursuit of knowledge about God, we lose sight of how real he is.

The Lord paused me in the middle of this when I came across a verse and found it so compelling that I taped it to my bathroom mirror the week before leaving for college: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.” (Psalm 27:4).

Do you ache to be with God? I think we’re too easily pleased with the world. We’re too willing to accept the things that will never satisfy us, to live against the grain of how God created us. The psalmist had it right. He wasn’t satisfied with the world. His deepest desire was to dwell with God, to gaze on his beauty, to know him.

As I jumped headfirst into the series of simultaneous joys and struggles that college brings all at once, the need for prayer continually increased. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this semester, it’s how life-giving prayer really is. This semester, it struck me just how beautiful it is to serve a God who is a Father and a friend— a God who wants to know me and be known.

Theology, the study of God, is valuable, but we aren’t meant to learn it just for the sake of attaining knowledge. Theological knowledge should lead to life change, and life change comes from a personal relationship with God, not only knowledge about him.

This Christmas season has helped me reflect on how thankful I am for the relational aspect of Christianity. It took me so many years to realize that all the festivities, the lights and the gifts and the memories made with family, are meant to point to something just as real and far more fulfilling. When we step back from the wonder of the Christmas season, we realize how messy Jesus coming into the world was. Jesus, the Son of God and Savior of human beings who would mistreat him time and time again, was born in a barn. The people impacted by his birth had their faith put to the test. The irony in the nativity story gives it so much beauty. Something about the paradox resonates with us because it’s real.

When the pleasures of the Christmas season don’t bring the joy that you expect and it hits you how unsatisfying this world is, let it bring you back to the longing we sometimes try to cover up and forget about. We long to be in God’s presence, whether we realize it or not. Christmas reminds us of the time when God took human form to live and die for us. It also points us to the future when he will return, and this time, everyone who believes in him will be with him in his presence forever. Emmanuel came to be with us so we can be with him. That’s the greatest gift of all.