If we feel we are failing to connect with God, we have to ask ourselves the all-important question of do we take Jesus seriously? But who is Jesus exactly? Get this question wrong and it doesn’t matter how important we make him. The great theologians of history in the Nicene Creed say Jesus is the only begotten Son of God who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven. For our sake he was crucified under the then Roman ruler Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the previously written predictions or prophesy found in the Bible. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The hundreds of people who saw him raised from the dead shook the world. 

Can we understand who Jesus is and still not take him seriously? Yes, here is why I think we do this easily in the western world.  One of my favorite places the take a walk is the cemetery. It is quiet and open, and I don’t have to worry about cars as I meander down the road.  But I also enjoy walking there because it reminds me of something that is hidden away from us in the way our lives are structured in modernity. That is the awfulness and  unavoidability of death.  We all end up in some sort of cemetery. The more we think of death as the unavoidable and horrible end to the fall of man (which we are participants) the more we see Jesus is needed. The more we are inclined to see his life deeply intertwined with our own.

We often live like death is not a possibility. That somehow I can make it to the retirement house at the top of the hill overlooking the bay and stay living there forever. We think this because we are taught this. We are advertised to incessantly in our media that this life is the ultimate in life and it is all there is. Have you ever seen a newspaper articles starting out with the question? Are you preparing yourself for heaven? We can come to think that victory is in this life only, and since this life is all we know, it is easy for us to have a blind spot here and have a tendency to deceive ourselves that this is true.  As actress Audry Hepburn said, “The most important thing is to enjoy your life – to be happy – it’s all that matters.”

Happiness is good. And it is not that the house on the top of the hill is a bad place. It isn’t. It is most likely a real great place to live and God bless us if we end up there for awhile. It is just that we can’t adjust our time, live with all our effort towards it, like it is the final destination.  The final destination of our lives is death and the judgement seat of God. All of us will face the judgement of God. (Hebrews 9:27) That is something that you don’t get at a “Better Habits of Success” seminar.  

We will take Jesus seriously because in the end game of death and the judgement of God the apostle John tells us that Jesus is the only advocate we will have whose words matters for eternity. (If we don’t like that, we need to find someone else who rose from the dead, was born of virgin, and fulfilled hundreds of prophetic predictions and was literally God incarnate.) This should dramatically alter how we emphasize our time. See Audry was wrong. This life appears to be just a blip on the radar. Eternal life is… well eternal. That is why we have to take Jesus seriously. More on how we can do this better in our next post.  

Doug

The words of British poet Robert Abrahams say it well, “For some men die by shrapnel, And some go down in flames, But most men perish inch by inch, In play at little games.”  Our goal is to identify the little games and put a stop to them and put the right weight on the right things.