1. God has taken on flesh! This is inescapably scandalous and offensive, but it’s true. That which is from the beginning (i.e. God) has become human! All the gritty details of being embodied apply to God! Just think of all the regular maintenance your body requires: everyday you have to brush your teeth, digest food, use the bathroom, cover your nakedness, pick bits of lettuce out of your teeth, etc. God is intimately acquainted with all the rigors and upkeep of embodied life! Furthermore, God has willingly experienced the sundry miseries of being embodied in a cursed world: He knows full-well what it means to feel deep mental and emotional anguish, physical fatigue, illness, bodily soreness, and the symptoms of laryngitis, etc.
  2. WHY? …Why would God choose to take on flesh in a cursed world!?
  3. Because He really really really wants to have JOYFUL FELLOWSHIP with us! And in order to have complete joy and fellowship with us, He must meet us where we’re at and rescue us.
  4. Now, let’s be really clear, God does NOT rescue us from our weakness or smallness. We will always be small and weak. In other words, we will never make a great name for ourselves, we will never be omnipotent, omnipresent, or omniscient, and we will never be sovereign over ourselves or our circumstances. God’s decision to take on flesh is scandalous because to be embodied is a limitation and God is intrinsically limitless; and God’s decision to pursue wretched people is scandalous because it seems to besmirch and befoul His perfect Name!
  5. God rescues us from our self-obsession, and the cursed consequences of our self-obsession.
  6. And, by the way, if you claim not to be self-obsessed, then you’re deceiving yourself, and the truth is not in you. But if you’re honest, and you confess that you are indeed a narcissist, then God is faithful and just to rescue you, forgive you, and cleanse you!