God with Us

I’ve seen a number of celebrities in person over the years, and they always seem a little smaller or different than what I expected. It’s funny how certain people actually look better in pictures than they do in real life—or look better in real life than they do in pictures. It’s strange the way the camera reads people.

Imagine the disciples walking and talking with Jesus Himself. I wonder if Jesus sometimes woke up in the morning to find all the disciples standing there staring at Him. The apostle John, who spent a lot of time with Christ, said, “We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). The phrase John used for “saw . . . with our own eyes” means “to view with attention, to contemplate, to gaze upon as a spectacle.”

John was saying, “We still see Him in our mind’s eye. We still hear the sound of His voice in our ears.” What a privilege! It’s an amazing thing to realize that God incarnate walked among us.

You might think, Oh man, I wish I could have been one of them! But John went on to say, “We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy” (verses 3–4).

John was saying, “This isn’t a privilege only for us. Yes, we walked and talked with Him, but you can know God in an intimate way as well.”