Risky Business

A friend who very graciously let me ease into writing for public consumption posted this on her blog a while back. It started as an email between friends and became something more. I wrote it in the passion of the moment the first time, and when I re-read it now, I feel the same breathless wonder. I've tweaked a sentence here or there, but the thought and my amazement remain. If you read this and find yourself wanting to hear more about a God who is beyond comparison, head over to Calling, "Shotgun!" and you won't be disappointed.


Every once in a while, I'm struck by the thought that what God did to rescue us was more significant than we can ever imagine. We know it was sacrificial. We’re told it was painful. But it was also risky.

We think of risk as what we do. We take the risk to forgive, to love, to trust, to believe…
But God took the first and greatest risk (which, by the way, makes all the risks we think we take for Him quite safe). The Son left Heaven and His Father's side and was born. The “One Who Always Was” was born - a baby.

Babies don't know anything. A newborn baby doesn't know that He is the Son of God, come to rescue all of mankind. Jesus left Heaven knowing that at conception He would forget (I’m not sure exactly how that all worked, but you get the idea). God (Father, Son and Spirit) had to trust that Jesus would find His way. Yes, I know, God is all-knowing. But Jesus came to us having willingly emptied Himself. He came to us as a man, and a baby-man at that.

"He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion." (Excerpted from Philippians 2:5-8, The Message)

It was a great risk: Would He remain sinless? Would he grow up to know His real Father? Would He listen to the Holy Spirit and discover who He really was? Would He rediscover the Plan that He had helped to formulate and carry it through? Because He did have a choice, after all. Choices. Just like the choices Adam and Eve had – and we all know how that turned out. The whole plan of redemption - the very Trinity! - rested on a baby!

What a brave, risky thing God did! Father, Son and Spirit risked it all! For us! God risked His Son, Himself, the relationship of the Trinity, and all of creation, just to rescue us. And Jesus was forever altered. For all of eternity past, the Son was perfect. From the cross forward, He is scarred. Because of...for...us.

These are the thoughts about Jesus that leave me breathless. So this was on my mind today, and tonight I listened to a recording of Jackie Pullinger (missionary to the Walled City, Hong Kong; she wrote "Chasing the Dragon") speaking at a church somewhere in the English-speaking world, and here is what she said (emphasis and bracketed insert mine, but taken from the context of the recording):

“As there's no more pain and crime [in Heaven], as there's no more death, no more sickness, we are perfect because of Him, and we're washed clean because of Him. The only one scarred in the whole of Heaven is Him. For that book, called The Revelation, tells us there's a Lamb, looking as though it's been slain. How strange that for eternity, we are perfected in the presence of a scarred Lamb.”

The only one scarred in the whole of Heaven is Him.

I think of Him as standing out among the whole of Heaven in beauty, in flashes of light, in power and victory. I have not – until now – thought of Him as standing out in all of Heaven as the only one who is scarred. He bears eternal scars so that we can be free of ours eternally. I’m overwhelmed.


What to do with a God like that?


That is the question, isn’t it?


What to do with Jesus?

Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God. It cost God plenty to get you out of that dead-end, empty-headed life you grew up in. He paid with Christ's sacred blood, you know. He died like an unblemished, sacrificial lamb. And this was no afterthought.

Even though it has only lately - at the end of the ages - become public knowledge, God always knew he was going to do this for you. It's because of this sacrificed Messiah, whom God then raised from the dead and glorified, that you trust God, that you know you have a future in God.

(1 Peter 1:18-21, The Message)


Ambushed by the God who gave it all up for me (and you),
Kimberly