By Leah Ramirez | September 27, 2026 | The Gathering, Colorado Springs

What if we’ve spent years trying to ascend to a God who has already come all the way down to us? And what if some of our deepest spiritual exhaustion comes from misunderstanding the direction of the Gospel itself?

This week, I found myself pondering these questions as I retraced some of the places where the Lord has met me over the years. There was a season when my life looked like long hours in the mountains, recovering under the canopy of God’s love for me. Quite literally, under the trees. I sometimes long for those days. The isolation, even the loneliness, still calls to me because somewhere in that wilderness, I discovered I wasn’t alone at all.

My life doesn’t look quite like that anymore. Ministry, writing, deadlines, and the beautiful responsibility of helping others find their way into this life of abiding have filled my days. And lately, I’ve been wrestling a little. Wondering whether I had left the better thing for a familiar thing. Whether the very work of helping others discover rest had begun to draw me back into some of my old patterns of performance. It’s an interesting thing to wrestle with while writing curriculum for a school devoted to abiding!

And so, I asked the Holy Spirit to reassure me. To help me retrace the breadcrumbs He had left along the way, hopefully making sure they were still there for others who might be coming this way. Back to simplicity. Back to abiding. Back to Him.

And He did. I began meeting Him in my car, parked at some rather epic mountain vistas, with coffee and my Bible. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes I heard a little phrase or found myself pondering a question He seemed to be asking. Sometimes I just sat and enjoyed His presence and what He had made. All week, I left myself little voice recordings so I could return to those conversations.

What emerged wasn’t so much a collection of information as an invitation. And perhaps that’s what we need more than anything else. We have access to more teaching and information than we could ever consume. But an invitation to see Jesus again? That’s another thing altogether.

Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand

We’ve been talking quite a bit about the order in which Paul presents the Gospel. The indicative before the imperative. He announces what God has accomplished in Christ, what is true about our identity and our location in Him, and then calls us to live from that truth. The instruction grows out of the announcement. What we are called to do is rooted in what God has already done.

This has been such a beautiful rediscovery for me. And, admittedly, a deeply unsettling one. After more than twenty-five years of ministry, I sometimes find myself wondering how I could have taught certain things for so long without seeing what now seems so wonderfully clear. But I keep coming back to the same prayer: Lord, this Gospel is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And I want to see more. Keep unsettling me with Your Good News!

One morning, while pondering all of this, a question surfaced. If the Gospel begins with an announcement of what God has done, why did Jesus begin His public ministry with what sounds like a command? Matthew 4:17 records His proclamation: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Through an old lens, we might hear something like, “Recognize how sinful you are, change your behavior, and then you will be able to come into the Kingdom.” Imperative first. Then, perhaps, the promise. But as I sat with the Lord, I began to see something I had overlooked. Jesus’ earthly mission didn’t begin with His public proclamation in Galilee. It began with the incarnation. Before Jesus ever called anyone to repent, heaven had already made its announcement.

An angel had appeared to a young virgin named Mary with extraordinary news. The Holy Spirit would come upon her, and the power of the Most High would overshadow her. She would conceive and give birth to the Son of God, whose Kingdom would have no end (Luke 1:26–38). God was coming. And not simply coming near. He was taking on our humanity.

We have done ourselves a great disservice by relegating the incarnation to a Christmas story. We celebrate it for a few weeks every December, but the incarnation is foundational to our understanding of the entire Gospel. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). God was manifested in the flesh (1 Timothy 3:16). In Christ, the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9). The One who existed in the form of God humbled Himself, taking the form of a servant and being born in human likeness (Philippians 2:6–8).

He didn’t arrive as a fully grown man, standing above the frailty of the human condition. He came as a helpless infant, entrusted to the care of His own creation. The Son of God was entrusted to a young girl. Oh, the humility of God!

The incarnation is God’s announcement that He has come all the way down to us. And suddenly, I began hearing Jesus’ call to repentance with new ears. What if He isn’t beginning with a demand that we fix ourselves so we can finally approach God? What if He is calling us to turn around and see what has happened? Open your eyes. I’m here. Heaven has invaded earth. God is standing in the flesh, and He has brought His Kingdom with Him.

Certainly, Jesus came to deal with sin and its terrible consequences. But He isn’t asking us to accomplish what only He could accomplish. He is inviting us to behold the One who has come to do it. Repentance involves a change of mind, a turning toward the truth. And perhaps one of the most foundational things we need to reconsider is what we believe about God Himself. Where is He? What is He like? How does He regard us? What has He done about the condition in which He found us?

For so many years, we began our presentation of the Gospel by trying to convince people of their sinfulness and separation. But the Gospel begins by announcing something about God. He has come looking for us.

The God Who Stoops to Write

Tuesday evening, during our first live Beholding gathering with Behold School, Chris directed our attention to the woman caught in adultery in John 8. It’s a familiar story, but something beautiful began unfolding as we considered Jesus in this passage.

The scribes and Pharisees bring a woman before Him. She has been caught in adultery, and they want to know what Jesus will do with her. The Law of Moses prescribed stoning for adultery. They are testing Him, looking for grounds to accuse Him. And Jesus stoops down. With His finger, He begins writing on the ground. They continue questioning Him. Finally, He stands and tells them that the one without sin should be the first to throw a stone. Then He stoops again and continues writing.

One by one, the accusers depart. And when Jesus straightens up, He asks the woman where they have gone. Has no one condemned her? “No one, Lord.” And then come those extraordinary words: “Neither do I condemn you.” He tells her to go and sin no more.

During our time together, our friend Bryan Olsen shared something that opened this passage in a new way for me. For years, people have speculated about what Jesus wrote in the dust. Perhaps He was writing the sins of the accusers, exposing their hypocrisy and humiliating them until they departed. But Bryan was seeing something else. He was thinking about Jeremiah 31 and God’s promise of a New Covenant.

Under the Old Covenant, the commandments had been written on tablets of stone. But through Jeremiah, the Lord announced that He would do something new. He would put His law within His people and write it upon their hearts. He would be their God, and they would be His people. They would know Him, and He would forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more (Jeremiah 31:31–34).

And here, in John 8, stands Jesus. The very embodiment of that promised covenant. Stooping down, with His finger in the dust. Scripture doesn’t tell us what He wrote. But what a beautiful picture of what He had come to accomplish!

I returned to Jeremiah 31 afterward because the Lord had been drawing my attention to that chapter throughout the week. And I noticed something else. In verse 22, the Lord speaks to His faithless daughter and declares that He is creating a new thing in the earth: “A woman shall encompass a man” (NKJV). The immediate context concerns Israel’s restoration, and the meaning of this unusual passage has been debated. Some Christian interpreters have historically seen in it a prophetic picture of Mary carrying Christ in her womb.

I had been pondering that possible connection to the incarnation, and now here I was, considering another woman, another faithless daughter, and the One who had come to meet her. Jesus stoops right into the place of her humiliation. He stands before her accusers, between her and the stones that were ready to be thrown. He comes all the way down into her condition. And what does He reveal? “Neither do I condemn you.” Then, “Go, and sin no more.”

There it is again. The indicative before the imperative. The revelation of His heart becomes the ground from which an entirely new way of living is possible. We might be tempted to focus primarily on the instruction to sin no more. But what if we lingered a little longer over the face of the One who said it? What if the transformation He desires begins with our encounter with Him?

When Even Intimacy Becomes Another Assignment

After Tuesday evening, we discovered that our recording hadn’t been captured. I was disappointed, particularly for those who couldn’t join us live. So Wednesday morning, I began writing down what had been shared, hoping to preserve something of our time together. As we sent that writing out to the students, the responses reminded me just how many believers are struggling with the same thing.

We have such a difficult time believing that simply being with God is enough. We are conditioned to measure our lives by usefulness. By productivity. By what we accomplished, what we learned, what we heard, or what we were able to produce. And those habits have followed us right into our relationship with God.

We set aside time to behold Him, hoping to hear His voice or receive some wonderful revelation. But perhaps our minds wander. We become more aware of our distractions than His presence. We come away wondering whether we did it correctly. Did I abide? Did I hear Him? Was that time fruitful? Should I have tried harder? And before we realize it, intimacy has become another assignment.

I understand this so well because I have lived there. There was a season when even Jesus’ invitation to abide sounded like a call for more labor. I knew intimacy was important, but I had somehow become convinced that it was something I was responsible for manufacturing. And when I couldn’t seem to do it successfully, the failure itself became another source of spiritual exhaustion.

But I wonder whether we might need to hear Jesus’ words to that woman again. Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you? Neither do I.

Sometimes the loudest accusations aren’t coming from anyone around us. They are coming from within. Every wandering thought, every distracted moment, every failed attempt to be faithful seems to confirm that we haven’t quite figured out how to do this Christian life. And yet, He has come all the way down into the very place where we are sitting. He isn’t waiting at the top of some spiritual mountain, wondering when we are finally going to get there. He is here.

Sometimes beholding is simply learning to remain with Him long enough to receive what He has been revealing about Himself. We don’t have to manufacture an encounter. We don’t have to produce a revelation. We don’t even have to come away with something impressive to say about the time we spent together. There is a beautiful phrase in Zephaniah 3:17 about the Lord quieting His people with His love. Perhaps some of us need to allow Him to do precisely that. To let the voices of our accusers fall away, one by one. To discover that there is no condemnation in the quiet.

The Vulnerability of God: He Just Wants Us

Many years ago, I wrote an essay about the vulnerability of God. I received some rather harsh criticism for it, and the response gave me pause. Perhaps to some, the idea of God’s vulnerability sounds like an assertion that God is weak. But that isn’t what I mean. I believe God is love. And to love is to willingly open oneself to another. Love desires to be received.

We hear something of this in Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem. How He longed to gather her children together, as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings, but they were unwilling (Matthew 23:37). And in Isaiah 49, we hear the Lord asking whether a nursing mother could forget her child. Even if she could, He says He will not forget His people. He has engraved them on the palms of His hands. What a remarkable revelation of His heart!

I love when the Lord shares something with me. I love those moments when a passage suddenly opens and I find myself seeing something I have never seen before. But lately, I’ve been wondering about something. What if He is just as delighted when I come to Him without needing anything from the encounter? What if I can simply say, “I’m here because I want to be with You. You don’t have to perform for me either. We can just be. I just want to be with You.”

I wonder how much of our spiritual striving would begin to fall away if we truly believed that God enjoys us. Not merely what we accomplish for Him. Not the quality of our prayers or the depth of our revelations. Us.

We practice His presence because we love Him. We behold because we want to know Him. We receive His love, and in that receiving, we give Him ours. Perhaps abiding is not another spiritual accomplishment. Perhaps it is learning to enjoy the One who has already given Himself to us.

The Mary Company: A Portion That Cannot Be Taken Away

I’ve been thinking about Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus while Martha busied herself with serving. In Luke 10:38–42, Martha becomes frustrated that her sister has left her to do the work alone. But Jesus gently tells her that Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her. He isn’t declaring that serving is wrong. He is revealing something about what matters most. Mary had discovered a portion that could not be taken from her.

I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to see a whole company of people formed around that discovery. A Mary Company. A people who have discovered God’s enjoyment of them and have become occupied with enjoying Him.

Our usefulness may diminish through age, pain, exhaustion, or changing seasons. There may come a time when we cannot accomplish the things we once could. Even our ministry assignments may change. But our portion remains. Communion with Him is not dependent upon our ability to remain productive.

And I think this connects beautifully with the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25. There is something about the oil of personal communion that cannot simply be borrowed from someone else’s relationship with God. We can receive ministry from others. We can learn from their revelation, and we absolutely need one another. But no one can enjoy Jesus on our behalf. There is a shared life into which each of us has been invited.

And as we receive His life, something begins to grow within us. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The fruit of the Spirit. Not characteristics we are desperately trying to manufacture in order to become more acceptable to God, but the life of Christ finding expression through people who are joined to Him.

This is the beauty of our union with Christ. Romans 6:5 speaks of our being united with Him in His death and resurrection. The language Paul uses is wonderfully organic. Older translations render the thought as being planted together, carrying the picture of lives joined so deeply that they now share a common life. We have not been joined to one part of Jesus. We are not united to the crucified Christ while somehow remaining separated from the risen Christ. The One to whom we are joined is the Christ who died, was buried, and rose again. His life is the source from which we now live.

This is where the Mary Company becomes both a picture of devotion and fruitfulness. We are not merely people who sit at His feet, nor are we people who abandon communion in order to become useful. We behold Him, receive Him, and carry His life. What He forms within us becomes visible through us.

And that brings me to one final thought.

Evangelism: Love Goes. Love Embodies. Love Descends.

I sometimes struggle with the word evangelism. Not because I don’t believe in it, but because of the old associations it can stir up in me. Programs. Pressure. Strategies for convincing people of how far they are from God. But what if we began with the incarnation? What if our understanding of evangelism was shaped by the very movement of God’s love?

Jesus did not stand at some lofty height, calling humanity to climb out of its condition and make its way to Him. He descended. He entered our vulnerability, our pain, our misunderstanding, our suffering, and ultimately, our death. He came looking for us. And now, as those who have been joined to Him, we are invited to participate in that same movement of love.

Paul describes this beautifully in 2 Corinthians 5:18–20. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, and He has entrusted to us the ministry and message of reconciliation. We are ambassadors through whom God makes His appeal. This isn’t an appeal for people to achieve something Christ has left unfinished. We are announcing what God has accomplished in His Son and inviting people to receive and participate in that reconciliation.

And perhaps this changes how we see the people around us. We no longer stand above them, calling them to climb up to where we are. We enter their lives with the same love that came looking for us. We meet people in the places where they believe themselves abandoned. We bear witness to the One who has entered our human condition, overcome sin and death, and opened the way into His own life.

We announce the Kingdom that has come near, and we say, “You don’t have to stay here.” We are not heralding our own spiritual achievement. We are heralding Jesus Christ.

This is the Gospel of a God who comes all the way down. The One who stooped to write in the dust is still revealing His heart to people who have forgotten what His face looks like. The One who took on our humanity has joined us to Himself in His death and resurrection. The One who invited Mary to enjoy His presence has given us a portion that cannot be taken away. And the One who came looking for us now sends us into the world as ambassadors of His reconciliation.

I think that’s what I want to keep discovering, and what I long for us to become together. A people who know Him. Who enjoy Him. Who live from His life rather than exhausting ourselves trying to produce it. A people through whom His love continues to descend.

After all, we are ambassadors of reconciliation. We walk people home.

Watch the Full Message

This teaching was shared by Leah Ramirez at The Gathering in Colorado Springs on September 27, 2026.

Watch The Love That Descends | The Gospel of a God Who Comes All the Way Down

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