You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues our Advent series as he asks listeners to consider how or when the

holiday season has made you dazed or confused.

He explores the ways in which Mary, Zechariah, and Joseph were dazed and confused themselves,

and how they each responded differently. The questions we are left with are these. How are we

allowing our own lives to be impacted by the invasion of Christ coming to earth? And how have we been

brought to the point of meeting to wrestle with the very

presence of God in our lives today?

In our last podcast, I talked about the Advent season is a time to not be caught up in the distractions and in many ways the foolishness of what this holiday

often seems to be. But actually a time to step back and to take into account that Jesus has invaded

this earth and his coming has created this consternation, this

conflagration of conflict, certainly with the kingdom of darkness. It knows only too well. You can look

through the Gospels, how demons, when they encounter Jesus in his adult years,

know who he is. You're the Son of God, and you have come, and then various sentences, but you have come to upend, to create upheaval for the Kingdom of Darkness.

And those who celebrate Christmas are joining this upheaval,

joining this war, joining the reality that the Kingdom of Light is dawning,

and the Kingdom of Darkness is in a frenetic fight for its kingdom's survival.

So in that, we celebrate this intrusion, odd, bizarre, incomprehensible, how God can become human flesh and be still fully God and also fully human.

And just as a sidebar, it means that when Jesus ascends to heaven, he ascends and does not lose his humanity.

But actually, humanity comes to exist in the Godhead.

That is Father, son, son, who is fully man, fully God, and the Holy Spirit.

So Trinity changes through the incarnation in a way in which we again can't comprehend,

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