The Third Day of Christmas: Emmanuel Revisited

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“...If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ...No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. “
~Romans 8:31-39

After so many weeks of waiting…. After so many weeks of praying for Emmanuel to come, this is the time to celebrate and remember that Christ IS in the world. God is here! 

In words borrowed from Steven Harper….
“God with us.  Not God behind us, so that we must long for some spiritual version of "the good old days."  Not God ahead of us, so that we can never see today as "good enough." No...none of that, but rather the only message that will do:'God with us!"  The present moment is sacred; we need not look for any other.  Our lives are encircled by Christ, so that whether we look backward or forward, we see him.  The Alpha and Omega has (as Eugene Petetson has translated it in The Message) "moved into the neighborhood" (John 1:14).”

And if God is with us, who can stand against us? If the church actively follows Christ and stands up for all that is good, then nothing will be able to stand against it!  How can we pray for our church to live into this kind of faith?

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