Wednesday 25 August 2010

How we deal with Jesus Part 2

O.K. so in church we see a lot of people who relate to Jesus as co-pilot. Jesus is not the king, I am, and Jesus can play the role of consultant when it suits me. However, there are other people in church who don't relate to Jesus like this. No rather than allowing Jesus to follow them around they follow him. However, this can be done in a bad way. Some people in church seem to relate to Jesus as his stalker. They like to follow him round, they like to know a lot of information about him, they like to be at events they think he'll be at but there is no real relationship.

I think this is a huge danger in church. We go to all the church meetings, we like to find out about Jesus, we read books about him, we can tell people more about him than anyone else but there is no friendship, no love, no real and meaningful interaction between us and Jesus. I think most of us would agree that stalking someone is not the same as a real relationship and yet it's very easy to con people into thinking we have a real relationship with Jesus when really all we are doing is stalking him to gain information about him!

So the question we're left with is are we actually nothing more than a slightly weird Jesus stalker? Are we more interested in knowing about him than knowing him? Are we more bothered about being around 'Jesus things' than we are actually relating to Jesus.

To reduce Jesus to an advisory role fails to recognise how awesome Jesus is but to simply stalk him fails to recognise how approachable he is. Many people in church confuse these ways of dealing with Jesus as real relationship wit him. I'd like to suggest that they're not!

Wednesday 18 August 2010

How we deal with Jesus Part 1

I have been thinking a lot recently about the way which we relate to Jesus. You see I guess everyone relates to Jesus in some way whether it's as an insignificant person in history or as something more! However, what really interested me was how different people in the church relate to him so I'm going to look at a few different ways we see people relating to Jesus in the church.

1. Jesus as co-pilot
O.K. so this is something both Michael Hall and Paul Lintott were talking about at church and it struck me as so true. What we find in our churches is people who basically want to pilot their own lives but are fine for Jesus to help out a little bit every now and again. If I'm in a bit of a fix or if it's something I don't really care about then Jesus can do a bit but if not then I'll do it by myself. We see this all the time in the church.
People who only obey Jesus when it fits in with their lifestyle
People who only obey Jesus when it fits in with their view of the world
Churches which are more committed to their way of doing things than to what Jesus wants!

If we relate to Jesus as co-pilot we are making 2 mistakes.
1 - We think we are capable of piloting our lives
2 - We think we know more than Jesus

To judge when Jesus deserves to be followed and obeyed and when he doesn't assumes that we know more than him. The problem is that he knows everything and that we don't! You can relate to Jesus as your co-pilot but ultimately you are not really relating to him properly and you are not relying on him at all. If this is you then you are still relying on yourself and unfortunately you are not capable of bringing about the forgiveness and transformation you need. Jesus is not your co-pilot, he's not your PA, he's too good for that!