A Devotion from Philips Brooks

God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.  —Acts 17:27

This, then, is the story of the present God.  What is the meaning of the Incarnation? We picture Christ coming from far, down through the ranks of angels, down from the battlements of heaven; far, far beyond the sun we picture him leaving his eternal seat and “coming down” to save the world. Then we picture Christ’s departure. Back by the way he came, beyond the sun again, once more through the shining hosts, until he takes his everlasting seat at the right hand of God. There is truth in such pictures. But haven’t we caught more of the spirit of the Incarnation if we think of it not as the bringing to us of a God who had been far away, but as the showing to us of a God who had been hidden? It is as if the cloud parted and the tired and thirsty traveler saw a brook of clear, sweet water running along close by the road traveled. Then the cloud closed again, but the traveler who had once seen the brook never could be faint with thirst again but must always know where to find it and drink of it. Christ was not a God coming out of absence. He was the ever-present God revealing how near he always was.

And so of the new life of Christ in people. It is not something strange and foreign, brought from far away. It is the deepest human sensibility, revealed and made actual. When you stand at last complete in Christ, it is not some rare adornments that he has lent from his divinity to clothe your humanity with. Those graces are the signs of your humanity. They are the flower of your human life, drawn out into luxuriance by the sunlight of the divine love. You take them as your own and wear them as the angels wear their wings.

This is what belief means, then. Not the far-off search for a distant God, but the turning, the looking, the trusting to a God who has been always present, who is present now. This is what belief means. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).