He writes:
Christians generally understand that they should be like Jesus Christ, but most of us don't know enough about Jesus to make this aspect of discipleship a daily reality in our lives.
There is no Christianity without Jesus Christ. He is at the centre of everything we believe in. He is our connection with God. We literally worship and adore him.
But we hardly know anything about him.
But how can we be like someone we don't know anything about?
Think about it for a while, and even scarier questions begin to emerge. What if Jesus isn't anything like what most of us think?
What if the real Jesus doesn't look anything like the stained glass windows and children's book illustrations? Even worse – what if we're not really following his teachings? What if Jesus wouldn't agree with either of our political parties' platforms? What if the core of his message is different then we think it is? What if we think we are doing a great job following him but in reality we would have been kicked out of the upper room?
What if we have lost a really pivotal idea of who Jesus is?
Pick up any popular book on American Christianity and you'll read about problems. The church has problems. Christianity has problems. We aren't functioning correctly. In some way, we're broken; we're sick. People are leaving churches, youth aren't keeping their faith into their college years, pastors are suffering from burnout, and church doors are closing all over the country.
Some of our churches are experiencing great numerical success, but statisticians like George Barna remind us that even as the majority of Americans claim to have had a conversion experience, and even some churches experience huge growth, only a tiny fraction of professed believers are truly committed to the faith, and most churches are struggling. If anything, the Western church appears to be shrinking. We're getting weaker, smaller. Slowly but surely, we're circling the drain.
Spare me the Bible verses about the narrow path if you find. I have read the New Testament, in the New Testament Church wasn't sick or dying. It grew exponentially. It rocked its world. It set in motion a movement that now encompasses the globe. Why don't we generally see that kind of movement in the church down the street?
Every book I have read has a different solution. Maybe we don't love hard enough. Maybe we don't pray hard enough. Maybe we don't evangelise enough. Maybe we haven't fully grasped God's grace. May be we're not satisfied enough involved. Maybe we're not committed to making disciples. Maybe we have failed to engage the culture. Maybe we have forgotten what our mission is. In short, these are all problems. But what is the source of these problems? Why aren't we doing all those things?
To me these problems sound like symptoms. The church at large hasn't found the real root of the issue, the real disease. Not yet.
I have been going to church for longer than I can remember. I have wondered, along with everyone else, what the problem is. Why doesn't our church looked like Acts 2 or 1 Corinthians 13 or Philippians 4? Why aren't church attendees becomingconverts and why aren't converts becoming disciples? Why do people in in church complain so much? Why do they leave at the drop of a hat? What's with the backbiting and shallowness? Where is the depth? Where is the passion? Where is the commitment? Where is the community? Where is the Love?
As committed Christians, we are so close to the answer. We are on the cusp of it. We are standing on the solution, and we don't even know it. We sing about it and church and hear about it from the pulpit.
The solution is Jesus, and the problem is that we have lost sight of who Jesus is.
Not only that, we have lost sight of so much of what Jesus came to do, of what Jesus' core message was, and even to whom Jesus' message was originally delivered.
In place of the real, living Jesus, we have substituted a theological formula, a set of beliefs, a litany of dogma. We have substituted the apostles' Creed for the teachings of the apostles. We have substituted the Nicene Creed for the person of Christ. I am not saying that beliefs are bad – they are good, they are necessary, and Christians cannot afford to be slouches when it comes to theology – but theology and beliefs are no substitute for a real relationship with a real person, the real historical Jesus.
The only solution to Christianity's problem, the only cure for her illness, is to bring back a personal, intimate knowledge of Christ, to really encounter him, to meet him afresh, to get to know him as the first Christians did. We have to know Jesus better. If necessary, we have to sacrifice everything else in order to know Jesus better.
There is no other solution. There is no way to sustain a Christianity that is not fully, completely centred on the historical person of Jesus Christ, and there is no way to centre our lives on Jesus Christ if we don't take the time and effort to know Jesus as well as we possibly can.
Jesus is all we have – our only connection with the father. If we get one thing right, it had better be Jesus.
"On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand."
If you are a disciple of Christ, then wherever your spiritual journey takes you from here, it must be informed by an accurate conception of Jesus. The picture of Jesus in your mind must match the real historical person of Jesus. In this chaotic world of full of differing and contradictory beliefs about Jesus, you cannot afford to be any less than crystal clear on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth.
Today, thanks to the efforts of centuries of biblical scholarship, we know that Jesus was a practising Jew. We know that our faith is built on nothing less than the blood and righteousness of a Jewish rabbi from a backwater town in Israel.
And I think this matters. Yeshua matters. The fact that Jesus was a practising Jew matters. It changes how we see him, how we here his teachings, how we follow him. It changes how we see ourselves and how we see his people, the Jewish people. It changes how we live and how we do church. It changes our message. Or at least it should.
Pages 143-146.
