"Promises Made, Promises Kept" (John 1: 9-18)

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This semester, we are looking at the big storyline of redemption that is laid out for us in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. In this weeks passage from John 1, we see how the Incarnation -- God taking on human flesh and blood-- is the final step in the story of redemption. In this final chapter of the story of redemption we see God stooping down, becoming one of us, becoming exactly what we need in order to be found and rescued by him. “Our hope is not in time cycling on predictably and benevolently under an almighty hand. Our hope is in time interrupted, disrupted, abruptly altering from moment to moment …  When I pray, I am not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. … because if you are a Christian you do not believe that the characteristic action of the God of everything is to mold the course of the universe powerfully from afar. For a Christian, the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be that man in the crowd; a man under arrest, and on his way to our common catastrophe.”— Francis Spufford "As a Christian I believe we live in parallel worlds. One world consists of hills and lakes and barns and politicians and shepherds watching their flocks by night. The other consists of angels and sinister forces and somewhere out there places called heaven and hell … One night in the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem, those two worlds came together at a dramatic point of intersection. God, who knows no before or after, entered time and space. God, who knows no boundaries took on the shocking confines of a baby’s skin, the ominous restraints of mortality.” — Phillip Yancey “God became human so that humans could become again, in reality, human” —Augustine of Hippo