You are listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

We hope you all had a very Merry Christmas this past week and are looking ahead to the new year with anticipation for all it may bring.

As we wrap up this series on the incarnation, we hope you are able

to look back and reflect on your own Christmas celebrations earlier this week, whether with family

or friends, and the gifts exchanged in wonder and joy. Dan is inviting us to consider how our

own gift giving reflects the gifts Jesus brings in his coming to earth, both as fully God and fully human.

As we come to our final Advent reflection, I do wish on behalf of the Allender Center and the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and certainly Becky and I, a very, very merry Christmas. May it be just again one of those exceptionally sweet times for you and your family.

We know only too well that this season bears a level of warfare, just a level of heartache

for many people. And whatever heartache was there prior Christmas itself as one of those high holidays

often brings just a deep and sense of the distress, the dis-ease of living in a fallen world.

And so we need the gift of Jesus at this season. And to say that he is the reason for the

season, yes, it's a lovely rhyme, but far more. He is the very being that we must be and to become. And so as we

think about this lovely phrase in John 114, the word became flesh. And that word is a Greek word, againito. And I want to read a passage that holds that, and it comes from the same chapter in John, John 1-1,

in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning. Through Him, all things were, againito were made.

And without him, nothing was made, againito. That was andito were made. And without him, nothing was made againito.

That was and has been made.

Again, the word is being used again and again again ato.

And it is, well, the concept of creation.

It's really we have in some sense in John 1-1, a real parallel to Genesis 1-1, and that

notion of creation that when we come into the word became flesh, there is a sense in which

this is a new creation, a new world is being sense in which this is a new creation.

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