“So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us.” (John 1:14, NLT)
I was thinking about this verse as I read it and came to some thoughts that I was challenged by. First of all, it is an amazing thing to spend some time thinking about the fact that Jesus became human and lived among us. Stop for a moment and think about why that should matter to us.
Have you ever watched an anthill on a hot summer day? Here you see these ants busy and at work running in all directions. They are building their little colonies, gathering food and tending to the queen of the ants. We can wonder what they think about or what life must be like for a little ant; we can even study them and make educated observations about them. But all this just remains speculation. We can never know really what it means to be an ant.
But what if we could become an ant? Only then would we be able to understand what the life of an ant really is like. And it is only then that we would be able to communicate and connect to other ants. Outside of this, ants could care less about us, unless we step on them, of course.
Even though God created us and is huge compared to us, the best way He could connect with us was to place Himself in the limitations of this human and frail body. He became like us and faced all the same things that we face in life. He was able to talk with us in a way that we can understand. And people were drawn to Him like a magnet. But there would always have existed a big gap if He never became like us. It is not that He couldn’t understand us, but we would have a difficult time understanding Him. So He became like us.
There is another side of this that I have been thinking about that really challenges me and the way I live. You see, this verse says that God became human and lived here on earth among us. Now before I share the challenging thought from this, I want to explain an aspect so that I am not misunderstood.
When Jesus came to this earth, He became human yet still maintained the fact that He was still God. For the most part, this is a mystery that will never be fully understood. But the evidence is there throughout the first four books in the New Testament that Jesus was fully human, yet He possessed the power of God. The Bible says that He was tempted and faced everything that we face in life, yet He never sinned.
Now with that said, I see so many people begin a relationship with Christ and lose the aspect of being human. They all of a sudden live on some other spiritual planet. You know some people like that I am sure. In fact, this is why I believe so many people think Christians are fake. They see someone become a Christian, and all of a sudden they start living on another planet, denying their humanity. Yet we see that Jesus became human.
Understand this. We are to become like God. That should be the goal of everyone who follows Christ. If we miss this pursuit of God, we really can’t know what it means to be human. There is something big that we learn from Jesus in this passage. We need to become like God and yet stay fully human—on this planet earth.
The reason I think so many people try to stop being human is that they think to be human means to be a sinner. But Jesus never sinned. He came to this earth to show us what it means to be fully human. Sin messes up what He created us to be. So Jesus’ life is a perfect picture of what it means to live a Christian life. This should be so important for us to grasp mainly because when Christians stop being human, they stop connecting to those who live in this world. And God’s plan to reach people is still through us, because we are human and He lives in us. If we stop being human, we miss connecting others to Christ.
So here it is again as simply as I can put it. We are to become like Jesus—pursuing godliness yet staying connected with the fact that God created us as humans—and are in a perfect position to reach this world by Christ living in us. Just remember that being human does not mean sinning. It means being what God originally created us to be! And that is the Gospel message—God connecting to us in a relationship, redeeming our lives to be all that He created us to be!
You will find incredible joy in this life the more you become all God created you to be!
