The Incomparable, Incarnate Christ

Dannah Gresh: How do you infuse your Christmas celebrations with meaning? Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Believe the gospel; trust Christ, and know that you belong to Him, and then this Christmas will be for you all that it was meant to be and all that it possibly can be!

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Incomparable, for Friday, December 5. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth loves to describe Jesus as incomparable. Today you’ll find out why. She and Kirk Cameron talked about The Incomparable Christ on her recent episode of Kirk’s TV program, Takeaways on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Kirk Cameron is a husband, father, and American actor. He loves to keep the focus on Christ in a profession that often strays far from Him. Here he is to introduce Nancy.

Kirk Cameron: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has ministered to the hearts of millions of women around the world through her teaching programs, her podcasts, her writings and her events. I’m so thrilled to have her with us today on Takeaways to discuss the character and the life of Jesus, with insights from her book Incomparable: 50 Days with Jesus.

Nancy, thank you so much for coming on Takeaways!

Nancy: Thank you, Kirk, for having me . . . and what more joyful, wonderful topic could we have than to just spend this time talking about Jesus? There’s no greater joy!

Kirk: I couldn’t agree more. So, Nancy, I want to talk about your book Incomparable, this fifty-day devotional speaking of the matchless qualities of our Savior. But first, I wonder if you might share with us a favorite Christmas memory?

Nancy: Well, I’m old enough now that I have got a lot of Christmas memories, but one of my greatest Christmas memories to date was a number of years ago where I had (long story short) the privilege of spending Christmas day in a women’s prison in the State of Arkansas. 

This was a group of women that I’d had the joy of getting to know and to minister to over the years. As the Lord arranged it that year, I was able to go in with some friends and bless these women and just talk with them about the gift of Jesus and how He brought His gift, not for perfect people because there are none, and not for polished people, but for people who were in desperate need . . . as we all are! It was an incredible thing to sit with those women and just talk with them about some of their Christmas memories. 

Then to have a woman say, “This Christmas I’m spending in prison is the first time I’m spending Christmas knowing Jesus and having a relationship with Him! I get it now what Christmas really is!” So that’s an unforgettable Christmas for me. It really was a joy to spend time with those precious women on this very sacred day!

Kirk: Whether it’s a testimony like that or it’s a song or a poem or a movie, the very best stories are redemption stories, aren’t they?

Nancy: Yes.

Kirk: “I was lost and now I’m found. I was dead and He brought me to life! I was blind and now I see.” Christmas can be that for so many people for the very first time if they really understand the incomparable attributes of this baby who showed up in a manger!

Nancy, I’m such a fan of both you and your husband, Robert, with the unique last name. What I love is that you both focus so much on relationships. You’re all about relationship, and Jesus was all about relationship with the Father, relationship with one another. And there is no more important relationship than our relationship with Jesus Christ!

In your book, you point out that not only did God—as Father—send His Son, Jesus, but that the Baby in the manger is so utterly unique that we need to have a relationship not only with the Father, but with the Son!

I’ve got a load of questions for you. Because you’re such a fantastic Bible teacher, I want to know, what can we know about the Baby before the Baby was even conceived?

Nancy: That’s an important question because the answer to it, as it relates to Jesus, is unlike the answer to any other person that’s ever been born. We think of Jesus starting there when He was born and He was put in the manger. But no, that wasn’t the start.

In fact, Jesus had been Jesus the Son of God all through eternity past! He never had a beginning; He was never created. In fact, Scripture tells us He was the Creator. He is the Creator; He is God. He never was not God!

In fact, Kirk, I was reading just this morning a passage in Proverbs you don’t usually think of as a Christmas passage. But in the book of Proverbs, chapter 8, Scripture says, “I was there when He established the heavens, when he laid out the horizon on the surface of the ocean, when He placed the skies above” (vv. 27–28)

The passage is speaking here of wisdom. We’re told that Jesus is the wisdom of God. He says, “I was a skilled craftsman beside Him” (v. 30). Jesus was working with His Father, even as He did His Father’s business here on earth.

But in eternity past He was skilled, He was working. It says, “I was his delight every day, always rejoicing before him. I was rejoicing in his inhabited world, delighting in the children of Adam” (vv. 30–31). 

So even before Jesus came to this earth, this like blows your mind. We can’t figure this out or understand it, but we’re told that He was delighting in His relationship with His Father. He was delighting in the children of men—in humanity. So when He came to this earth, it was to fulfill His Father’s desires, to obey His Father, to come and show us His amazing love!

So yes, we need to remember that Jesus was always God. He was always in existence; He had all the glory of God the Father. And yet, on that day in Bethlehem, He came into this world and infinity took on being finite. The Creator became the creature. The immortal became mortal.

So what a wonder this is that Jesus, the incomparable God Himself, should condescend, should stoop down to become one of us. And it’s all because, as you said, He is a God who is seeking for redemption. There was no other way for that to happen apart from this amazing plan that God designed.

Kirk: Wow! Wow, we could spend the rest of our lives just unpacking what you just said! And I hope that in heaven for all of eternity, we will have a chance to do that!

Nancy: Amen, yes.

Kirk: Nancy, could you help us unpack a little bit more why the incarnation of Jesus was a game-changer? Again, why was the eternal God taking on human flesh . . . a pivotal change in the story of humanity? And, how does that affect us today?

Nancy: Well, and that’s the meaning of the word “incarnation.” Sometimes we throw around that theological term, which isn’t familiar to everyone. It just means, “to be in the flesh; to take on humanity.”

So Jesus already was God; He never ceased being God. But at Christmas (what we call Christmas, what we celebrate as Christmas) He not only kept His God-ness, but He also took on, became fully human.

Now, again, our minds cannot comprehend that. Maybe in heaven we’ll get it better than we can now. But He put on human flesh, and He became one of us. Scripture says that He had to take on human flesh in order to be able to reconcile us as sinners to a holy God. 

He was going to offer a sacrifice of His life to save us from our sin, and in order to do that He had to become one of us. He had to take on all our weakness, our need. He got hungry; He got thirsty; He had emotions.

He had to walk places. He didn’t just get transported in some way; He had to walk. It took Him ten minutes to take a ten-minute walk. So He did not use all of His glories and all of His God-ness when He took on the manhood, the humanity, and became everything that humanity is—except that He was sinless, except that He never sinned.

He was tempted—as we are—but He fulfilled what the very first man, Adam, did not do, which was to obey God. He became the perfect God/man. And the interesting thing is, we learn in Scripture (I know I’m skipping ahead a little bit in the story) that now that He’s ascended to heaven, He still is the God/man.

He still has a human, physical body. I don’t think we always realize that. He has ascended to heaven and He still understands our humanity, but in the perfection, the sinlessness. He died to make sons of men sons of God. He could not do that without Himself becoming a son of man, being born of a woman.

So it’s a great mystery, but it makes Christmas amazing! Christmas can be harried and busy and chaotic. But if we can step back and just remind ourselves of the wonder of what this season is about, it changes everything about our lives, not just one day of the year, but 365 days of the year.

Dannah: You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Usually on our program, Nancy is the one teaching or asking the questions, but today we’re hearing a conversation Kirk Cameron had with Nancy for the program Takeaways.

Kirk: Nancy, my wife and I just became grandparents just a couple of months ago. 

Nancy: Yay!

Kirk: We’ve got this chubby little bundle that we can’t squeeze enough and kiss enough, and it is just delightful! What is the right way for us to think about the Baby in the manger?

Nancy: Well, you see these pictures on Christmas cards of this little cherubic baby with maybe a halo over its head. Then we sing that Christmas carol: “The little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.”

Listen, I love the Christmas carols—I love that one. But that particular line is not true. [Kirk laughs.] Jesus did cry. He had normal bodily functions in His humanity—except for the sin. So when we see this Baby in the manger, we need to realize that, yes, He’s precious. Yes, He’s the greatest gift ever given to humanity. Yes, He is God . . . but He also is human.

And He’s not going to stay in that manger. He’s going to grow up, He’s going to become a man, and He’s going to give His life for sinners . . . which is the whole reason He was born in the first place.

So, we don’t want to park in the Christmas season and stop and stay there, because that really is not the end of the story, it’s the next piece of the story that leads ultimately to the cross and then to the resurrection, and then to having Jesus ascended for us in heaven today!

Kirk: Your book speaks of the incomparable attributes of Jesus, and we’ve talked about a few that are matchless! Who else is eternal? God taking on human flesh and entering into a broken world, but Jesus? But that’s not the end of the story, as you said. Can you share with us some of the incomparable aspects of His teaching, of His prayer life, and of His peace?

Nancy: Yes, in every way we can imagine, Jesus was not just “Jesus the Great”—as we would say, "Alexander the Great” or "Napoleon the Great.” He was not just a great man; He was the incomparable, one and only Jesus in every way you can imagine!

So when He would teach . . . You know, there were a lot of rabbis and teachers in that day, and people would go to the synagogue and they would listen to the teachers. I think some of those teachers were maybe “snoozers,” because the people had gotten [the mindset of], “Ya, ya, ya . . . whatever, whatever.”

But when Jesus spoke. There was a hush! You could hear a pin drop. Now, sometimes people got mad, but they were amazed at His teaching! Why was that? Because He wasn’t just reciting from rote what everybody else was saying. 

He was filled with the Spirit of God, and He was opening the Word of God. He was God. Imagine Jesus teaching us the ways of God! And people, they either loved Him or they hated Him, but there was no falling asleep when Jesus was speaking!

And when He prayed, Jesus introduced a concept of prayer that you almost never find in the Old Testament, and that is, calling God our Father! You have the greatness of God, the imminence, the transcendence of God in the Old Testament. But Jesus said, “When you pray, pray this way: ‘Our Father.’” 

Nancy: He’s a relational God. It’s the God who says you can ask Him for your daily bread. You can tell Him that you’ve sinned and you need forgiveness. You can ask Him to help you forgive people who have sinned against you. You can put all your needs, all your desires . . . you can come close to Him because Jesus came close to us to help us be able to come close to the Father. 

So in every way when He was walking on this earth, He looked like a man. In fact, the Old Testament says prophetically that there was nothing stunning about His appearance. We don’t know what He looked like, but we know it wasn’t that people said, “Oh! He’s a model, or He’d make a great actor, or He’s a handsome man!” You don’t see that.

But you see people being taken by the wonder of who He was and what He said and how He loved people. How He treated women, who were considered like nothing, just dirt, pieces of property in that culture. But here was Jesus who loved and honored and exalted women and helped needy people. He drew near to like the dregs of society, the people that nobody had any time or room for. I mean, He just went, like, against all the normal codes of what the rabbis and the priests and the great leaders would do.

He said, “I’ve come to seek and to save the lost!” And everywhere He went, that message penetrated the hearts of humble people who had been waiting and longing for a Redeemer and a Messiah!

It really went against the grain of the religious guys who said, “No! We've got to get rid of this guy! We can’t have Him anymore!” 

Kirk: Would you share with us some of the other incomparable attributes of Jesus and His work that you highlight in your book?

Nancy: Well, Jesus is incomparable in every way, everything about Him. Of course, He lived a sinless life, a life we could not live and did not live. He died a death He did not deserve. We deserved to die, because the Scripture says, “The soul that sins, it will die!” 

But He died a sinless death for—not His own sins, but for our sins. And so, the weight of our sins was placed upon Him. And what it meant for Him to bear all of that—the judgment of God, the anger of God, the wrath of God—that we’re the ones who deserve it!

In fact, you think of Jesus just before He goes to the cross, two things really stand out in my mind. One is, as He was leaving that last supper and He has told His disciples, “I’m going to offer up My blood and My body to be shed for your sins,” He knows what He’s going to face.

And then Scripture says, as they left that room, “They sang a hymn.” They sang a hymn! Now, we believe that hymn to be from Psalm 118, hymns, psalms that would have been sung around the Passover dinner.

Part of the psalm is, “This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it!” So here, the Savior is going to suffer and die, to be brutalized, to be tormented, to be taunted, and yet, there’s this serenity about Him as He faces the cross that can sing a hymn in the midst of and as He’s facing that suffering! 

So on the one hand you have this serenity and on the other hand you see, when He gets to Gethsemane . . . That word means “oil press.” It’s where olives were pressed and squeezed and weight was put upon them until that reddish, oozing oil came out of the olives. It’s exactly what was going to happen to Jesus as the weight of our sin, the weight of God’s wrath and God’s judgment pressed down on Him, and the water and blood came out of His corpuscles and He’s going through that excruciating pain. He knows that's what He’s facing! 

And yet He’s praying to His Father! And He’s not just saying, you know, “Oh, la-ti-dah! I know how the story ends so this is going to be no sweat!” No! it was sweat! It was tears! It was anguish, because Jesus hated sin! He loved sinners, but He had never committed one single sin against His heavenly Father in all of His whole life.

And now He’s going to take all of the sins of the human race on Himself. And in that garden as He prays, the disciples over there are sleeping because they’re exhausted from all the drama and the trauma that has gone on. So, He’s alone with His Father.

He’s saying, “Oh Father, if it’s possible, I don’t want to go through this!” He’s honest. He’s real. He has those very human emotions. But then, “Not my will, but Your will be done.” All this is incomparable!

We look with wonder and with amazement. We say, “We would not have had that kind of serenity in the midst of storms and the trials, nor would we have the hatred of sin.” We love our sin, truth be told. We don’t want to love it, we know we shouldn’t love it, but we wouldn’t sin if we didn't want to do it.

But Jesus, who didn’t want to sin, didn’t want to offend His Father, said, “I’m willing to take on Myself all the sin, every sin ever committed by every sinner in the whole history of the world.” He said, “I’ll take it on Myself, and I’ll bear the price!”

I mean, Who but Jesus?! What a wonder this is, that He would do this for us!

Kirk: It is amazing! It’s incomparable, as you say in your book. While Jesus was all those things and Jesus was like no one else, what does that do for us today? What does that do for us this Christmas?

Nancy: Well, thankfully, as we said earlier, the story doesn’t end at Christmas. That’s just one scene—a really important scene—because had He not become human flesh, He could have not been our Savior.

But then He went to the cross, died as the sacrificial Lamb of God. I can imagine that the demons of hell thought that they had won! You know, “We’ve crucified Him. We’ve gotten rid of Him!” They hate Jesus; they hate God! That’s why they put Him to death!

But God always gets the final word, heaven always gets the final word! On the third day—we know the story, but I think we forget the wonder of it all—Jesus could not be held captive by death! He was raised up from the dead by the Holy Spirit of God!

 

He appeared to more than 500 people over the next forty days. Then He ascended to heaven and the Scripture tells us that He, today, sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven. First of all, He sits. He’s not anxious. He’s not pacing about what’s going on in our world.

Psalm 29 tells us that He is enthroned forever. He sits in the presence of God. He is God. We don’t get how all that works together. But what does He do? He is advocating for us. When we see our sin and we confess it, He says, “Oh Father, I’ve paid the price for that sin. Forgive that sinner. Don’t let that child of God die.”

He intercedes for us when we don’t even know what to pray or how to pray or what we need. He is interceding before the Father with us. He is preparing a place for us in heaven! However magnificent may be the home or the homes or the vacation spots we can enjoy on this earth, they’re trash, they’re hovels, they’re nothing compared to what Jesus is preparing for us, waiting to welcome us, to receive us! 

And we come into His presence. Imagine God were to say, “Why should I let you in here?” Well, I have no answer. There is no goodness of my own. Nothing I’ve done, not because I wrote books or I taught Bible programs or I try to live a good life. No. The only answer I will have, the only answer anyone can have that is the right answer is, “I don’t deserve heaven. I don’t deserve to be with You. I deserve hell. I deserve to die for my sin. But Jesus died in my place, for me.” 

And so by faith we receive, we embrace the goodness, the gift! We celebrate that Baby in the manger; we celebrate that Child growing up, that Man living a sinless life serving and giving Himself, dying on that cross, rising up from the grave, ascending into heaven seated at the right hand of the Father and waiting to receive us into His presence to spend eternity with Him! That is the best possible news this Christmas for those who repent of their sin and believe the Good News, the gospel of Jesus Christ!

But I’ve got to also say that’s really bad news for those who say, “No, I want to do it myself. I don’t really need Jesus. I can get myself through this life and into heaven. I’ve been good enough or I’ve been in church enough,” or anything we offer of our own righteousness. It’s trash. It’s dirt. It’s nothing!

So my longing this Christmas is, I think about friends and people in our community who have never trusted in Jesus for their salvation. I think, Believe the gospel. Trust Christ and know that you belong to Him. Then this Christmas will be for you all that it was meant to be and all that it possibly can be!

Kirk: Merry Christmas, Nancy and Robert and to your family. Thank you so much for joining us on Takeaways!

Dannah: That’s Kirk Cameron from Trinity Broadcasting Network. He’s been talking with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. What a wonderful presentation of the gospel that was! Believing the Good News of Jesus Christ changes everything, my friend!

The Christmas season is full of wonder—not because of lights, snowy sidewalks, Christmas trees, or your favorite family traditions. It’s full of wonder because of Jesus, the Savior who was born for you!

If you’d like to read Nancy’s book Incomparable: 50 Days with Jesus, you can find it in a link of the transcript of today’s program at ReviveOurHearts.com. And whatever you think about Jesus . . . He is more! Incomparably more! I think you’ll see that as you read.

Maybe all of this about Jesus is new to you, though. Can I encourage you to go to this page on our website to learn more? It’s ReviveOurHearts.com/GoodNews. That’s all one word, GoodNews. 

Well, it’s December, and that means we’re in planning mode for the coming year! As we dream about all God will do through Revive Our Hearts in 2026, we’re asking Him once again to provide for all of our financial needs . . . and that’s where you come in.

As this year comes to a close, I want to ask, “Would you prayerfully consider partnering with us through a financial gift of any amount?” In partnering with us financially, you’re serving women like Amy, who wrote to us to tell us . . .

Amy: Revive Our Hearts has blessed me and helped me so much. I can’t get enough of it! I know the Holy Spirit is guiding me through the ministry. I really needed a biblically sound group of women in my life. I just wanted to write and thank everyone who has given. God has revived me because of you!

Dannah: Oh, wow! Do you realize if you’ve given in the past, God has used you and other listeners to revive Amy’s heart. I mean, what an encouraging testimony from this sweet listener! If you’re listening right now, thank you, Amy.

Now, when you give this month, you’re helping us reach women like Amy who are hungry for biblical truth and guidance. Together we can see lives transformed as the Word continues to go forth in great power.

Now don’t forget, during the month of December, your donation will be matched dollar for dollar by a group of generous donors up to a total of 1.5 million dollars. They’ve generously stepped up to multiply your giving!

Now, we’re going to have to go past that 1.5 million dollar match to meet our goal for the year, but if you give right now, it’s likely that we’ll still be within the matching amount and your gift will be doubled.

To partner with us, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. I don't know about you, but when I give to a ministry like Revive Our Hearts, I love it when my gift is doubled, so take advantage of that right now.

Now, I hope you’ll join us on Monday as we listen to a message from Noël Piper. If you’re getting into the holiday spirit, then you are going to love this one! It’s all about treasuring Christ in our traditions. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB. 

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