When God Came Close

Picture a king arriving somewhere. Not a modern politician doing a photo-op — an actual king, the kind people used to wait for. There'd be a procession. Trumpets, maybe. Certainly an entourage. The whole point of the arrival is that you'd know, from a hundred yards away, that someone important had shown up.

That's roughly what people expected when they imagined God finally showing up in person.

For four hundred years before Jesus was born, there had been no prophets. No new revelation. Just silence, and a people living under Roman occupation, waiting. The hope that kept circulating was that the Messiah would arrive as a warrior — someone with the power to overthrow an empire and the political weight to finally set things right.

What they got was a baby. Born to a teenage mother, into a family with no particular status, in a town where his parents apparently couldn't even secure a normal room to stay in. No procession. No entourage. Just a manger, some animals, and a level of quiet that must have felt like an anticlimax to anyone expecting a king.

That gap — between the God people expected and the God who actually showed up — is where this whole idea lives.

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Humility Over Prestige

The passage underneath all of this is Philippians 2:5–11, and the specific hinge is verses 6 through 8:

"Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness."

It's worth sitting with what that is not saying. It's not saying God stopped being God for a while. It's not a temporary demotion. Paul's language is additive — Jesus didn't subtract his divinity to become human, he added humanity to it. Fully God. Also, somehow, fully human. Hungry. Tired. Capable of grief.

Given every reason to hold onto status — and he had every reason — God chose the opposite. Not because prestige was somehow unavailable to him, but because it wasn't actually what he was after. What he was after was closeness.

A God Who Comes Down Instead of Waiting

Here's the shift that's easy to miss: God didn't ask humanity to close the distance. He closed it.

He didn't stay in a position of power and wait for people to somehow become worthy enough to approach him. He came down into hunger, exhaustion, rejection, grief, and betrayal from people he was close to. Not observed from a distance — actually lived.

There's a story from Spencer, the Grove's student pastor, that makes this less abstract. A few months back, he had a sudden, alarming health scare — a splitting headache out of nowhere, followed by a trip to urgent care that turned into an ER visit and a possible stroke workup. He was doing all of it alone, trying to convince himself it was nothing, when Charlie Loften showed up and just sat with him.

No advice. No "you should have done this differently." Just presence. At some point, Charlie said something like: you don't have to do this by yourself.

It's a small moment, but it's a fairly exact picture of what this passage is describing on a much larger scale. Not a God who fixes things from a distance and calls it love, but one who shows up in the actual hard moment — not to lecture, but because he wants to understand what you're carrying, not just resolve it for you.

The Invitation Isn't Waiting on a Feeling

If you've been waiting for the right moment to take any of this seriously — a specific feeling, the right worship set, a sermon that finally lands exactly right — it's worth naming that none of this hinges on that. The coming-close already happened. It was finished two thousand years ago, whether or not the moment ever feels cinematic.

So the real question isn't whether God will eventually show up in a way you can feel. It's whether you're willing to turn toward the one who already has.

Whatever you're sitting with this week — a pattern you can't seem to break, a strained relationship, the quiet exhaustion of doing life alone — the claim underneath this passage is a fairly direct one: you were never meant to carry it by yourself, because God didn't choose to stay distant in the first place.

This is the fifth post in our Foundations series. You can listen to the full sermon at thegrovechurch.org.

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