God Like Us

In 1995, singer-songwriter Joan Osborne released a song that very nearly made it to the top of the charts in pop music.  The song was "What If God Was One Of Us," and it stirred something in me when I first heard it.  

Some years before, I had gone back to church for the first time in years.  I'd embraced agnosticism pretty hard, and the few months that I spent back in a church (a charismatic Presbyterian church, if you can believe it) helped to crack open some of the walls I'd built around my heart.  

But when I moved away from that church, I really never went back to one for another five years or more.  It wasn't that I wasn't open to faith, I just had no idea how to find my way back to a God I'd come to believe either didn't exist, or was so far removed from Creation that it really didn't matter.  

But then there was that song.  And the chorus got stuck in my head: 

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryna make his way home?

It would take years before I realized just how true and beautiful those lyrics were, and how they helped me realize that God is present in the world, and in us.  

One of the most powerful truths of the Christian faith is that God did not remain distant from human suffering, struggle, or joy, but instead chose to enter into it. 

In Jesus, God became fully human. Not just to save us, but to show us. To show us how God loves, how God forgives, how God dreams for the world to be.

Rachel Held Evans put it beautifully:

“We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, God got up.”

Jesus didn’t come to hand out a checklist for moral perfection. He came to embody divine love in human skin. To weep with the grieving, eat with the outcast, bless the children, and confront the systems of injustice that trample the vulnerable. 

He came to show us that true power lies not in dominance but in compassion, not in grasping but in giving.

And because God became like us, we know this: God gets us not just in a theological sense, but in the most intimate, personal, flesh-and-bone way. 

God knows what it means to be tired, to be tempted, to feel joy and sorrow, to face rejection, to suffer, and to love deeply. That changes everything. We do not follow a God who is far removed, but one who walks with us still.

And here’s the incredible part: when we embrace our true humanity—loved, flawed, and made in God’s image—we are invited to continue what Jesus began. To be the hands and feet of Christ in the world. To show up in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and homes with the kind of love that heals, restores, forgives, and brings life.

To follow Jesus is to live as though we are the ones showing the world what it looks like when God gets what God wants—peace instead of violence, mercy instead of vengeance, belonging instead of exclusion.

You were made in God’s image. You are called to embody that image in the world. Not perfectly, but faithfully. Because God became like us, we can become a reflection of God's love in everything we do.

Prayer: 

God of love and mercy, thank You for becoming one of us in Jesus. Help me to live each day as a reflection of Your grace—healing, loving, and serving. Make me Your hands and feet in this world. Amen.