Jesus: the New Wine Tasting!
Ok, here’s the truth. Wine people really bug me; not the ones who drink it, but you know, the ones who are so into it. And NO! It’s not because I am a total abstainer. Fine, have your glass of wine. Glory in your liberty if you must. I really am not bothered by that. What bugs me is all this connoisseur crap. You know all the vintage, and bouquet and swirling and smelling. Ohhh please. It’s a beverage, get over yourself. You like it, congratulations! Is it really better than fruit juice or Kool-Aid? I mean, I was thirsty, I drank something that quenched my thirst and I liked it, big deal! “Ohh this new G2 grape Gatorade, it’s toootallly out of this world, bottled in July of ‘08, you have to breath this in, look at the way it sparkles in the glass” Ooohhh puuulllleeasssse!
Ok, that’s not what really bugs me. What truly sets me back is the growing number of people who seem to be doing that with Jesus. Sampling and smelling the parts of his nature that appeal to them and ignoring the things they find less to their taste. Getting together in little huddles around a candle and consuming the comforting while ignoring so much much of what is compelling and commanding. “Ohhh, let’s crack open a bottle of the ‘middle ages Jesus,” as if we really have any substantive clue about what Christ was doing in people and how they followed him, in say, 1147AD. “Can’t you sense His melancholy walking through this damp castle calling out in the corridor to people hiding in the shadows of biblical illiteracy?” Ah no, no I’m not sensing anything at all.
In my observation all these connoisseurs of Jesus are really just the spiritual children of the Jesus marketers. Libraries have been filled with speculations about the dangers and negative impact on the gospel from the Jesus diluters. Much damage has been done trying to make the Lord palatable to our perceptions of what pagans/want/need. I doubt He appreciates all this apologizing for who He has revealed himself to be. Examples abound of how this is happening and who is actually doing it, but all of us who claim to love the Lord must make the effort to esteem others as better than ourselves (Phil 2:3) and not to be wise in our own eyes (Prov. 3:7).
We all need the same thing. We desperately need to journey away from our prejudicial/familial view of Jesus Christ. We need to come back to the biblical center, where He is known in all His fullness without bias or historical blockage. Down with Eastern Orthodox Jesus, down with Emerging Jesus, down with western world anti-supernatural dead bible church Jesus, down with mainline watered down secular pseudo scholarly sentimental Jesus, down with Roman Catholic pomp and circumstance we have him and you don’t Jesus, and down with heartless self-interested felt need corporate mega church Jesus. Down with gospel Jesus and OT prophecy Jesus, and Pauline Jesus, as partial sketches of the total biblical Christ. God help all of us to stop tasting and sampling and swirling Jesus in the glass of our own preferences. Only the light of total biblical revelation is bright enough to expose the darkness of our own stagnant thinking about a Christ who is caricatured by what we find most pleasing to our own perspectives.
God give me a renewed passion to drink deeply from the only pure water that reveals Jesus Christ. God help me to embrace with my whole heart every page, every verse, every word of Scripture as it reveals the person and the work of Jesus Christ the Lord. Help me to see and savor all that He is… all of His compassion, all of His holiness and purity, all of His righteous anger over injustice, all of his renunciation of the temporal and superficial, and all of His passionate pursuit of people lost in darkness without the light only He can bring. My mom taught a little chorus to a basement full of after-school kids who came from the neighborhood to her bible club; the song says it so well.
“The Bible is the written word of God, It tells about the living word of God, On every page, on every line you’ll find the Son of God divine, If you want to learn to know the King of Kings, if you want to learn of all the heavenly things, read the book! Learn the book! Let the book teach you.”
That’s what I’m going for!
Categorized as: Bible, Christian Life, From James
