The "With-God Life" essay "The People of God with Immanuel"
A Selection by Richard J. Foster and the General Editors
"And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14).
In a word, spiritual formation is "Christlikeness" from the inside out. It is this end to which God has been working since the beginning. Christlikeness does, in fact, create the all-inclusive community that genuinely unites us and knits us together as one. It is the wholeness and holiness for which, by nature, the human heart hungers, and which is displayed among the people of God through the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit. Qualified and powerful "ambassadors for Christ," we live here and now as "children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine like stars in the world" (2 Cor. 5:20; Phil. 2:15).
Limits and Liabilities for Our Formation
The primary limitations of this form of God-with-us are twofold. First, social conditions shaped expectations in a manner that prevented many people from being able to receive Jesus as "Messiah." In the minds of nearly everyone the Messiah would bring a kind of radical political reform and restoration of national identity that was flatly incompatible with the realities of God's kingdom and the central teachings of Jesus. This prevented a correct understanding and reception of that kingdom, and made the personal presence of Jesus, though extremely powerful and convincing, also confusing and enigmatic, even to his closest followers. Neither Jesus' behavior nor his teaching could be understood within the cultural assumptions at the time he lived; and to step outside those assumptions was almost impossible, even for the most well-intentioned hearer. Further mediation was needed.
Jesus, of course, understood all this, and provision was made for a correct understanding to develop, as the resurrection, Pentecost, and the story of the Church unfolds in the book of Acts and continues to unfold up to this very day.
The second limitation is the fact that "the Spirit was not yet given" (John 7:39, NASV). The death and departure of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit upon the disciples was, in point of fact, a liberation of Christ from the self-imposed limitations of the divine presence in the individual life of a Jewish rabbi (Phil. 2:5-8). With this liberation the person of Christ became free to move with the word of the gospel of the kingdom throughout the inner life of the disciples and about the world at large (Acts 6:7, 19:20, 2 Tim. 2:9, John 14: 15-26, Col. 3:16, etc.). But the Gospels do not provide the final and ultimately perfect way God will dwell in his people as Acts, the Epistles, and Revelation vividly reveal. History's work is not yet complete.