One morning as I sat with the Lord, I wrote in my journal, “One of the things I love about you, Lord, is you’re so — human!”

Is it blasphemy to say such things? Am I trying to bring God down to my level?

No, because He already did that when he sent Jesus to live among us, as one of us!

Christ entered into the human race to fulfill God’s human experience.

God wanted to know what it feels like to be us in every way. He put on a flesh body and walked with us. Yes, so He could redeem us, but also to walk in our human experience — in our shoes. In this, God showed His commitment to perfect justice in the exercise of His compassion, mercy and judgments.

I wrote what I did that day because I was experiencing, as I often do, a comfortableness in His presence. As if He is like me, and “gets” me. I was searching for a word to describe how being with God felt to me, and human was the only word that fit. It was, in that moment, the best compliment my heart could offer. And I’m confident He took it that way, because, as I said, He gets me. In the quest to know and understand your magnificent God,

It is crucial to recognize His humanity.

By that I mean, to think of God not only as God, but as a Person. The Bible reveals God as the original Person: divine, yet expressing what we think of as human qualities: jealousy, anger, delight, love, compassion, disappointment, grief, and joy.

The fact is, God is not like us; we are like Him — by His own design. God made you in His image.

Whatever God created you to be in your human spirit and soul, existed first in Him. Your humanity is actually an expression of God’s being. That’s why one key to knowing God is to view Him through the lens of your own humanity. Not to diminish Him, but to understand what He desires, what He hates, what delights Him, what grieves Him.

You need joy, because He needs joy.

You experience disappointment and grief, because God experiences disappointment and grief. He testifies to it all through His prophets in your Bible.

When He invites you to put your hope in Him, it is with full awareness of what it is like to be one who hopes.

To say “God hopes” is to acknowledge that He doesn’t control you.

He gave you free will, and hopes you will use it to reach for him. God knows what it’s like to hope for something you do not yet have. God doesn’t manipulate your heart; He woos and inspires and nudges.

God hopes for things He won’t make you do. Think about it: God wants everyone to choose righteousness, and be good; but the obvious fact is that if He was making everyone be good, our world would be a very different place.

God hopes you will answer His invitation to fellowship with Him, that you will show up for a genuine relationship. When God made a way for you to be cleansed of sin, it wasn’t just for your sake; it was for His. He doesn’t want you to merely hope in His forgiveness; God wants what that forgiveness makes possible: a peace between you that enables you to share life together.

What does God hope for?

In Romans 8:20, the Apostle Paul wrote that God hopes …. that His creation itself would be set free from its slavery to corruption and come into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (NASB)

If there was ever a phrase worth unpacking, it is that one: “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

First, God invites you to use your freedom to seek him. Why? Because when you do, glorious things happen between you and in you, and leaks out all over your world. God’s greatest glory isn’t measured in the awesome Rocky Mountain range or the oceans of the world. His greatest glory is all about His steadfast love and faithfulness, His righteousness and justice. Being the child of such a God is meant to be a glorious experience of all that.

And the more you taste of God’s glory, the more you absorb His ways of being, and take on His kind of glory in how you love and relate to others. That’s what God has always hoped for in relating to His people.

God made you in His image; your humanity comes from God himself.

Therefore, it is wrong treat the union of God and human as an impossible, insurmountable thing. Your humanity IS the expression of His image.

It’s the part where your humanity is cloaked in flesh that makes trouble for you, and all who came before. Which is why God needed prophets to summon His creation back from sin. Reading through the prophets is not the easiest part of the Bible to absorb. But it is critical that you do read those, too, because they reveal the heart, heartbreak, and hopes of God.

God prosecutes His case, not to condemn, but to woo His people back.

Micah prophesied same time frame as Isaiah, during the reigns of kings Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah.
God prosecutes his case very well through each prophet — stating what He has done for his people, how long he suffered their rebellion, how he longs for them to turn to him with all their hearts, then finally, the judgment that will come if they don’t.

Yet through each prophet, God always ends by offering His people hope in their hopeless state.
Likewise, Micah’s message opens with God calling his people to listen while He testifies against them about their transgressions, and warns of God’s judgments to come because of their transgression, which was that they turned away from God to worship vile idols.

They belonged to this magnificent God, and instead of trusting in Him, they carved idols from wood and stone, set them in front of them and bowed down to them.

In Micah, as with the other prophets, you can HEAR GOD’S profound GRIEF over this.

Every Prophet offered a piece of God’s Hope Puzzle

Isaiah: That God would heal us from the failings of our humanity, and send His son to walk among us, and show God’s commitment to us and His desire for us.

Jeremiah: the covenant promise that we would know and walk with God.

Ezekial: that God would put in us a new heart and spirit

Prophecy of Micah 5:2-5, offering ultimate HOPE

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.” Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor bears a son, and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.

And he will be our peace.

NOTICE!!! God isn’t just offering YOU hope through His Son. This promise of hope is for God too, for us and us together.

Peace between us and God means life shared.

Jesus isn’t just offering us a peaceful heart condition. He was coming to create the peace between us and God that enables us to share life together in all the ways He intended when he created us.

GOD HAS A DREAM. And it looks like you and He together, rejoicing in each other, working together, you being taught how to be like him, and spreading that righteousness like leaven in the earth. (THAT is the glory of being God’s inheritance!)

After dire judgment, God’s tender hope:

He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6:8, NASB

First, focus on the phrase, “walk with.” That speaks of sharing life together! The Son of God came to earth in a flesh suit just for this purpose: to make it possible for you to walk with God.

Furthermore, God does all of these things: He acts justly towards you. He always gives you the right thing. He loves you well, and loves to be kind to you. Jesus spent three years among us to show us how to do humanity.

God has called us to fellowship.

The Apostle John said said,

What we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.

1 John 1:3-4 (NASB)

God’s Word: in his humanity, God hopes:

For fellowship with you, for a genuine relationship of knowing you and being known by you. He has literally done everything to make that possible.

He wants you to want to have that relationship with Him. God desires for you to desire him.

He doesn’t want you to merely hope in forgiveness, though that is the crucial beginning. He wants what forgiveness opens up for you — BOTH OF YOU: peace and rest with Him. A relationship unhindered by sin or oughts or a guilty conscience.

This is the hope to which God has called you to share with Him!

Paul revealed this in Ephesians 1:17-18. A newer Bible translation called The Passion Translation does it best:

I pray that the Father of glory, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, would impart to you the riches of the Spirit of wisdom and the Spirit of revelation to know him through your deepening intimacy with him.

I pray that the light of God will illuminate the eyes of your imagination, flooding you with light, until you experience the full revelation of the hope of his calling —that is, the wealth of God’s glorious inheritances that he finds in us, his holy ones!

The hope of his calling: God’s “WHY”

Paul reveals that why God called you to Him in the first place: because YOU are what God sees as His wealth — His glorious inheritance — His people. YOU are what God sees as his treasure, what makes Him rich.

God, the God who has everything, can make anything, chose you for His inheritance. And Jesus purchased this for His Father with his precious lifeblood.

We celebrate Christmas as being all about God’s gift to us, but it began because Jesus was determined to give the Father what He desired: You. YOU were the only thing on His list.

God hopes you will share life together in a way that reveals God’s glory; and even invites you to share in that glory.

I share this in my own hope any thoughts you have of being insignificant to God, of being unseen or unheard or unloved — will be banished forever.

God hopes and desires that you walk humbly with Him.

God hopes for this because this is who He is! God “walks humbly” with you. David, the shepherd and warrior king who loved God so nearly and dearly, acknowledged this when he said of God:

You give me your shield of victory, and your right hand sustains me; you stoop down to make me great.

Psalm 18:35 (NIV)

God hopes that you will desire Him, as He desires you

God hopes that you will desire Him, and seek to understand Him. He said as much through the Prophet Jeremiah:

Thus says the Lord, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the Lord.

Jeremiah 9:23-24 (NASB)

God wants to be known by you. Let that sink in, and forever shush the voice that says it’s just too hard to know God. Or that you’re not worthy. In truth, none of us deserves to know God, but God has made that point irrelevant. You don’t get to decide if you’re worthy, you only get to decide if you will treasure Him enough to respond to this amazing invitation, and thereby live worthy of the privilege.

Going home for the holidays: duty or delight?

As I write this, Thanksgiving is just in the rear view mirror. This holiday, more than any other, highlights the good and bad in your relationships. Relationships feel good when there is mutual peace and joy in each other. They feel bad when conflict exists, when oughts, debts or trespasses stand between you and your relatives.

Or, if one of you just doesn’t value the relationship as much as other stuff going on in your world, you’re only half there for them. Your holiday may be reduced to a pit stop, a duty call on your way to where you really want to be — because somewhere else feels more fun or more satisfying.

God doesn’t want that any more than you do. He hopes you come home for a feast of love and nourishment, so He can satisfy your heart. Every day.

He doesn’t want your Christian experience to be limited to isolated sensations, fleeting connections in prayer, or a long-distance, boring concept of heaven that takes a back burner to your life now. He doesn’t want you to just pit stop because it’s your duty.

He hopes that you will hope with all hope for what He has promised in Christ: a very present, intimate connection between you, where abundant life can really happen, for your joy and for His glory.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13

God hopes that you will hope in him. That you will let your heart lean on Him and trust Him to make it all possible. That you will desire Him as much as He desires you. God hopes.

That, Beloved, is a hope you have the ability to fulfill.