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

In light of the Advent season, Dan begins a series about the incarnation, the word made flesh.

As you'll hear Dan say in just a moment,

the incarnation is an entry into a world where Jesus, the Word of God, made the world out of

nothing and yet becomes a creature of that world. In particular, Dan discusses what it means

that Jesus is the word and the implications that has on our lives.

I'm privileged to have three weeks with you to think about Christmas.

And in this Advent series, I will say, as I have done a few other times, that Christmas is not one of my, I don't know, choice holidays.

And so let me just get my grinchiness out of the way and just say the

exuberance for shopping, the exhaustion of the season, usually as an academic, it's the end of

the year for me, papers to grade. It's usually when I get ill. so usually some level of either flu or lung infection.

With all that, it's not even Jesus's birthday. We don't have a clue when Jesus was born.

We, you know, in some context, probably in around 1,000 AD, there was sort of the taking over of a pagan Celtic holiday of a celebration of light, the darkest portion of the winter.

And it was sort of arranged to sort of bring in the birth of Jesus. So with all that, why talk about Advent? Well, because Jesus was born,

and his incarnation is a life-giving, complex, paradoxical, sweet gift.

This year, we're not going to be looking at the narratives, particularly in Matthew or Luke,

regarding the birth of Jesus.

I felt like this season for me felt like one in which I and the world around me has suffered

immense division and a lot of anger and a lot of exhaustion and to be honest, just a lot of

emptiness.

And it felt like, at least for my own sake, what I needed to do was to go back to text that I've utilized as an entry

point to have a taste of the reality of what I'm talking about. And I went back to a book that I've

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