“I just hope that when I pray, God is listening to me.” The honesty and anguish my friend expressed were very real. She believed in God and had accepted Christ’s forgiveness through the cross. But she did not fully understand what it meant that God was with her daily and that she didn’t have to do something to grab God’s attention. She needed the encouragement of knowing that God does indeed listen to us because He is always with us.
This text, proclaimed often during Advent and Christmas, offers news that would have been surprising to those who first heard it. There is also tremendous encouragement in the verse as well. This surprise and the accompanying encouragement happen in the connection that Matthew makes with this verse. He connects the birth of Jesus to the promise God had spoken through Isaiah hundreds of years before. The shock to those first readers would have come when Matthew identified the name of this baby as Immanuel and reminded them that the name means “God with us.” God would no longer live only in the Holy of Holies in the temple. Instead He would live with humans. God’s name, which they were not allowed to write or speak for fear of making it unholy, is now one that each person could know and speak. In a world that longed for God to intervene in a mighty and powerful way, God came to them to demonstrate that the incredible way He chooses to intervene in history is to be personally present with each one of us. His name means “God with us.”
I chose to encourage my friend with the reminder that God not only hears her prayers but is present with her all the time. She received that news with great relief and happiness. But I do not want to take any of this good news for granted. I, too, want to celebrate the joy and surprise of the life-changing truth that the powerful, awesome, holy, sovereign God of the entire universe came to live in us, in me. He is Immanuel, God with us!