Is Your Jesus Real?

This is Jesus speaking and it goes against the impotent Jesus one sees plastered on the sides of buses or adorning internet art.  It also goes against the Jesus that is often preached from pulpits all across our country.

The Jesus the world wants is a liberal Jesus:  a Jesus of convenience and a Jesus who isn't dangerous:  a Savior, but not a Judge - a Sacrifice, but not a Sovereign.  The worlds wants a Jesus that endorses and empowers their own hopes and dreams, but that makes no demands other than acceptance of a few facts that is called the Gospel.  

This is not however the person that Jesus was and is, and it certainly isn't the message He gives about Himself:

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Matthew 10:32-39 (NIV)

32 "Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven. 

34 "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn " 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law-- 36 a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.' 37 "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38 and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 

39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 

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The real Jesus demands not only commitment, but a primacy of commitment.  He not only must be followed, He must be followed first before anyone or anything else.  And this discipleship isn't sourced from duty.  In other words, it isn't religious.  It's sourced from love.  Because it's sourced from love, the duty that it does impart follows naturally.  Therefore it isn't religious, but is instead simply proper.

And the path upon which we must follow Him is in the likeness of His death.  If we try to follow Him yet stay upon the path we were born on, we will lose the life about which we so desperately worry and try to keep alive.  But if we are willing to give up our life and our goals, on account of Him and His goals - for His sake, then we will find the life that we so desperately seek.

What we will discover is that our life isn't our life.  It's His life.  And when we give up ourselves to Him, He takes His life and makes it our life.  What an uneven trade!  But this is what grace is.  

The 'disowning' of verse 32 is explained in verses 34-39.  After learning about Christ and His message, to decline to love Him more than anyone else is to disown Him.  To decline to give up the little life we think we have cobbled together for ourselves, and instead accept the life He offers is to disown Him. 

Because of His nature and character as God, He demands that we take Him as a whole.  This is because God is one.  He isn't divisible.  When we seek to take advantage of only the parts of God that we like, we seek to do the impossible which is to fracture the unbreakable.  Thus we disown Him and reject Him at the most foundational level possible - His very nature as a person.  It is the ultimate insult to reject the only thing that is perfect because it is perfect.

God works all of this through revelation and revelation alone.  This is nothing which we could have ever learned empirically.  To deny the revelation that God has made plain in Jesus is to decline to acknowledge Him (to take note of Him in a serious manner and to pay attention to what He says and obey it).   But to accept Him for Who He was and what He said, to believe Him in a manner whereby obedient actions naturally follow, is to acknowledge Him before men.

What a different church we would have if this were really preached.  How many wolves would be denied entry if the social gospel were denied and God's gospel proclaimed.  And what a different country we could have if we had a church as God intended.  And what a different world we could have if the most powerful country in the world were truly "Christian".