This May Sting a Little

Some stories still amaze me. It doesn’t matter how many times I hear them, tell them, or read them. They are just simply amazing. I was looking recently at the book of Exodus. God accomplished some miraculous things. The people of Israel observed and experienced some miraculous things. But that was not enough.

In chapter 19, some really interesting things happen. The people of Israel have been out of Egypt for a mere two months. That means it had been two months since the parting of the Red Sea which clearly was a testament to the power of God. Now they find themselves at the foot of Mt. Sinai. God meets with Moses on the top of the mountain and says, “Now if you will obey me and keep my covenant, you will be my special treasure in all the earth, for the whole earth belongs to me.” The Israelites quickly agreed. God had already proven his might.

Then things get more interesting. God appears in mighty ways and gives them instructions and boundaries. “Do not touch or come close to my boundaries,” God says.“For if you do, you will surely die.” Then God gives the Ten Commandments and meets with Moses to give him ceremonial and cultural laws.

The Israelites get impatient with the amount of time that it is taking Moses to return. They have Aaron, Moses’ brother, make for them an idol of gold shaped like a calf, an image worshiped in Egypt. They are so anxious to worship something that they fall down before an image created from their own possessions and past experiences.

The modern application and relevance of this story is astounding. The more I study God’s word, the more I see that many of our failures (my failures) are a result of seeing Jesus as we want Him to be and not as He is. Too often, the Jesus that we worship is the one that we create. We take various attributes of the real Jesus (the ones that we like) and shape them into an image that we can safely worship. He is an image that we have shaped out of our possessions and past experiences. If the Israelites had named their image “Jesus” would it have made their worship any less idolatrous? Is that really any different in principle and practice from what we do?

I have some dear friends in Mississippi that own a home décor store. They offer great accoutrements for homes at fantastic prices. One of their better selling items is a picture of Jesus… as a black man. It should be noted that it is not just our brothers and sisters who have a darker epidermis layer who are comforted by an image of Jesus that closely resembles them. The fact is that this is a very visual demonstration of a multi-cultural reality. We all have a tendency to transform Jesus into our image as opposed to letting Him transform us into His.

The more I look at my life, the more I appreciate my Jesus. My Jesus understands me. My Jesus gives grace and mercy for my sins. My Jesus forgets all my indiscretions. My Jesus loves me exactly as I am. However, my Jesus is a lie. My Jesus is a lie because the reality is that my Jesus is my creation.

If I’m honest, then the above statements actually read as follows: My Jesus understands me but demands nothing from me. My Jesus gives grace and mercy for my sins but stands in righteous judgment of all others (the ones I don’t struggle with). My Jesus forgets all my indiscretions but remembers those who fail me. My Jesus loves me exactly as I am and does not expect me to change. For too long, we all have lived our lives by these bottom set of statements. We haven’t been truly transformed by his working in our lives because we haven’t really allowed him to work.

We haven’t allowed Him to work because we don’t really know who He is. We, generally speaking, would not allow an actual stranger into our lives to shape our character. Jesus, the real one, is a stranger to us, and we all learned at a young age not to talk to strangers. Of course the NAME is familiar. But what about the man…the Messiah, the Holy ONE of God…are we familiar with Him? I submit to you that we are not familiar with Him because we are not completely surrendered to Him nor do we really expect to be. And our lack of real accountability tells us that this is okay, that this is typical. And it is typical. That is the saddest thing of all.

But it is not okay. One of the traps of our “sinner saved by grace” identity is that we still give ourselves permission to sin. When sin is permissible, it is tolerable. When sin is tolerable, it is normal. The real Jesus’ expectations and standards were higher than that. Shouldn’t ours be?

One thing is clear. Jesus’ ministry was with the sinners. He made it habit of being with thieves and prostitutes. He was criticized and chastised for it. But when these people were in his presence they were changed. They surrendered their old identities, and He gave them new ones. When they departed, he usually gave the same command to each of them: “Go and sin no more!” He never once said, “Keep doing what you were doing!” But we allow that. It is normal.

The problem with most of us (me included) is that we want the best of both worlds. We want some of the things that Jesus esteems as virtuous and moral. We desperately want the heavenly reward after life is over. But we don’t really want to give up the things that matter most to us. The result is a hybrid Jesus that rewards us but doesn’t demand too much. We surrender to THAT one. It doesn’t cost us anything.

In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus tells two parables about the kingdom of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that a man found hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he had in order to buy the field and get the treasure. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl merchant on the lookout for choice pearls. When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and bought it!”

I recently did work at an equestrian center. The owner of this facility told me of a horse recently purchased by one of his borders for $400,000.00. “Do you want to see it,” he asked. I have rarely seen anything worth that much so I readily accepted his offer. The horse was beautiful. But it wasn’t that much bigger or prettier than other horses at the facility. “What makes a horse worth that much,” I asked, expecting a brief lesson on horse husbandry. “Two things,” he answered, “The idiot who sets the price, and the idiot who pays the price.”

The transaction that Jesus wants to make with us is incomparable to this. He is offering something priceless for something worthless. We are the idiots if we don’t take the transaction. But until we become convinced that what he offers is worth much more than what we currently value, we will never make the trade. We will just come up with more reasons why we really don’t have too. We want our crown of gold without accepting our crown of thorns.

The truth of Jesus’ parable in Matthew is hidden from our Sunday school books and bumper stickers. In those, salvation is free. And that is true enough as it relates to our hybrid Jesus. But the real Jesus says that in order to experience salvation we must trade our old life for a new one. That means that we DO NOT get to keep any part of it. Truthfully, it means that we don’t even want to. The extent to which your new life looks exactly like your old one determines your degree of surrender…sort of. In actuality, if you are 90% surrendered then you are really not surrendered at all. It just means that you didn’t value the 90% you gave to Him. The real value of your life is in the 10% that you hold so tightly to.

In Philippians 1:20, Paul writes that he lives “in eager expectation and hope that I will never do anything that causes me shame…” Is that your expectation? We have lowered our standards so much that we have made the word of God impotent in our lives. Falling at the feet of our hybrid Jesus doesn’t cause us to change. It only causes us to make concessions that the real Jesus would never permit us to make.

Thankfully, the real Jesus still has a ministry with sinners. The bible makes it clear that “when we sin we have an advocate.” (1 John 2:1) Please understand, surrender does not mean perfection. Surrender means taking up our cross daily. We have unintentionally sanitized the gruesome reality of the cross. The cross was an instrument of death and torture. To take our cross up daily means that we choose to place our “selves” (pride, preferences, and pretenses) on that cruel instrument. In other words, we die to self. We truly surrender. It is not easy. In fact, it is torture. But it is worth it. We only need convince ourselves of this.

P.S. If the skin color of Jesus really matters to any brothers and sisters with a white epidermis layer (or any other color), then you aren’t in love with the real Jesus…just your version of Him. It doesn’t really matter how you mentally picture Jesus, as long as you allow Him to change your mentality.