Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
Have you ever tried talking to somebody about something that they didn't have any experience in? They just smile and nod along with you as you're talking. This is how it feels when I talk to my friends without kids about life with kids. You're sharing about the chaos, about trying to get kids ready for church, trying to get them in the car, or cleaning up all their messes. It just feels endless. It's always hectic. It's always crazy.
I remember talking to one of my friends about life with kids, and I just ended the story with, "You know what I mean?" They just smiled and looked at me and said, "Honestly, not really." It was then that I realized it wasn't that they didn't want to listen to me, it's just that they couldn't relate to the experience. It made me feel badly for talking about these things with my friend.
I think sometimes we can do the same thing with God. We share all of our burdens, we share about the craziness of life, and then we stop and pause and go, "But you're God. Do you really understand what I'm going through?" Maybe that makes us want to pull back and not share everything with Him.
Jesus Is Fully God and Fully Man
That's why I love verses like our Verse of the Day, Colossians chapter 2 verse 9. The apostle Paul says this: For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body. That's a hard concept to grasp—that Jesus Christ is God, but in Him is the fullness of man. It's worth thinking through this.
The reality is, we're not going to fully comprehend the complex nature of God and what it means that Jesus can be 100 percent God and 100 percent man. What it does mean is that Jesus can relate to us—that everything we go through, every temptation we face, Jesus has gone through it, yet without sin.
When you look at the scriptures, it's easy to watch Jesus in His ministry and see Him do these incredible things, overcoming incredible temptation and go, "Well, of course He could do that. He's God. It must be easy for Him." But remember, it's not 50 percent man, 50 percent God, where He's jumping back and forth when He needs to. It's 100 percent both, 100 percent of the time.
I think of when Jesus was walking on the waves through the storm, and the disciples look out and they say, "It's a ghost!" But it was Jesus. As they hear His voice, they recognize Him. Peter asks Jesus to call him out onto the waves with Him. As Peter stands in the midst of the storm, he looks at the waves and he gets scared.
There’s this juxtaposition between Jesus standing on the waves as God and man, and Peter sinking. But Jesus had the same temptation to be afraid like Peter did. Jesus struggled with the same things that Peter would have struggled with.
Come Boldly to the Throne
We can understand here, through verses like this, that we should be talking to God, and we can be talking to God about everything because He's a relatable God. It makes me think of what the author of Hebrews writes in Hebrews chapter 4 verses 14 through 16:
So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for He faced all of the same testings we do. Yet He did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God, that we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.
We can come boldly before the throne, and we can look to Jesus as King and as Priest, and also as relatable. We don't have to feel badly about sharing the big or the little things—the chaos of everyday life as a human—because He gets it. Share your heart with God, knowing that He cares deeply because He can relate to you.
