Standing in church today, singing about Jesus' death and resurrection, I found a thought creeping across the surface of my mind... a thought that took my breath away:
We didn't get it.
We, the people with whom I was raised. The people who loved and worshiped the Lord three times a week and taught me to seek the Lord when I needed answers, and put the Word of God at the center of my life...
We missed the entire message of the Jesus story.
Most of the adults came from traditions wherein Jesus was found in a manger or on the cross, and was otherwise unimportant. Because that was all their churches concentrated on, they were excited to find a people who studied the entire Bible, and they came to belittle both Jesus' birth and death as "religious". The children were taught both events as periphery stories. We were taught to "take Jesus off the cross and out of the manger." It was the 33 and a half years in between that was important.
Growing up under this teaching, I came to understand that Jesus' whole life was just proof that we could overcome, in ourselves. That we, in our own strength, could reach perfection... "if not us, who? if not now, when?" All we needed was the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost was the final ingredient needed to make living above sin possible. It was the one thing the Old Testament saints lacked and what they had to be resurrected to receive...
40 God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.
Hebrews 11:40
The "better thing" being, of course, the gift of the Holy Ghost.
This message COMPLETELY missed the point of Jesus' life and death... that's why the cross did not matter to my people. Jesus came to earth only to prove to us that we could live a sinless life -- shame on you if you did not! Once Jesus gave us the Holy Ghost, there were no more excuses. Quit complaining and just do it... after all, Jesus did, and we now had everything He had. The whole point of His life on earth was to be an example of how we could live a perfect life.
Standing there, singing, I suddenly realized that this was not what Jesus was about at all!
What I saw in the Gospel message hit me like a blow to the solar plexus:
Jesus did not come to show His contempt for us by doing what we would not do... He came to show His love for us by giving up all His strength and glory to do what we could not do.
His death was not for the shedding of the Holy Ghost. His death was for the remission of sins.
23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
Romans 3:23-26
Had Jesus chosen, at the last minute, not to die, we could not have been spared. Mankind would have been doomed.
His death mattered.
It is His death that saves us. The Holy Ghost is to comfort and guide us, but the Holy Ghost CANNOT save us. Only the blood of Jesus can.
The Gospel story is not about us getting a tool that we can use to overcome sin in ourselves. The Gospel story is about Jesus doing it ALL for us. The Gospel life, then, is about us learning to accept that truth and to hide in it, drawing ever closer to Christ and to His cross and letting Him do the rest.
4 Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Psalm 37:4
He doesn't give you what your heart desires (the way I always interpreted this scripture), rather, He gives you the desires your heart is supposed to have.
This is why Jesus gave us the picture of communion - a physical picture of his broken body and shed blood - to keep us coming back again and again to His sacrifice, His righteousness. To remember that it is His righteousness that covers us, and as we come ever closer to that cross, it is He that justifies us and makes the changes in our heart and our will that draw us ever closer to what He designed us to be.
"The only thing we bring to our salvation is our sin." (Gregg Harris)
And our only job... is to come.
Jules, on December 29, 2013, Wyatt and I began going to a church that I daresay would cause my mother to roll over in her grave if she had one. As soon as I walked through the doors I felt a peace that I have never felt. Julie, I felt a reverence for God, I've never felt. I have been going to church my entire life but found out this year that I did not get it. I did not get the reason that Jesus came to live on the earth. I celebrated Lent, and Holy week. I cried the entire week of Holy week because I was truly learning why Jesus came. During that week, I was so excited about the things that I was learning, I began to tell other people about it. These people who grew up in "Babylon" already knew what we did not. They knew the reason Jesus came to earth. I'm still in awe. Since we celebrated no holidays we missed the most important one. We were so busy judging other people when they had it right all along...wow!
ReplyDeleteYou got it. The problem was that the adults had heard these messages and didn't want to hear them anymore...they wanted something new. But that meant that we kids completely missed out. One of these days I may post what I've learned about communion. :)
ReplyDeleteOooh, I can't wait. I totally want to hear about that! The Maundy Thursday service at my church was amazing. As we celebrated the last supper. It was incredible to really learn about these things that we've read about, I'm sure even memorized the scriptures, and yet we were only regurgitating the information, we weren't really hearing it. We had no idea. It’s kind of funny, we totally made fun of people and their traditions. It might have been good to take ½ a minute to find out the reasoning behind the them.
ReplyDelete