Monday, December 29, 2014
424 - Forward into the New Year
Spirituality Column #424
December 30, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
"The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which is lost," Luke 19:10
Jesus arrived in time, space and humanity with a clear mission. He came as fulfillment, truth, light, goodness, salvation and the only way to God. He’s also the ultimate answer to the ultimate question: What is the meaning of life?
Take a good look. HE is.
Jesus Christ, life’s author, presents humanity with the perfect answer in a complete package. Jesus isn’t just an idea to make us go to church. He’s not a myth to make us behave. He’s certainly not merely a “teacher” with good ideas and 2,000 years of mystically effective PR. He’s the perfect image of God because He is God, in whose image man was created in freedom and love.
As we privately diddle with New Year’s resolutions aimed at fixing some small corner of our human experience (lose a few pounds, drop a bad habit, pick up a good book, etc.), there is a better, great big way forward into the New Year found in accepting and reaffirming our adoption in and relationship with Christ.
Don’t imagine it’s divinely glorifying to divide the enormity of God’s grace into bite-sized bits of self-improvement. Don’t buy into the backwards, omnipresent, secular message that happiness is found within, and Jesus is something we can do without. Jesus is the human example of what glorifies God.
We forget that our goal is to be human because we ourselves are so busy trying to be God. We conclude Jesus isn’t God because He doesn’t always do what we want. There is great competition for temporal glory among fallen mankind’s appetites and insecurities. We know there is something bigger out there, and culture relentlessly suggests it is us. No, it’s bigger than that.
In Christ I can endeavor to be fully human, because Jesus is fully human. He’s also fully perfect because He is fully God. I’ll fall short of perfection in this life because I’m a lost sinner, weakened by the vagaries of this fallen world and beset on all sides by a cultural message that holds secularism – faith’s opposite – to be profanely, mundanely and inanely “sacred.” Large swaths of society consider sincere Christian sacredness – which is actually, truly and exclusively the province of the holiness, glory and love of God – to be naïve nonsense.
That’s backwards. God’s sacredness is as real as secularism’s hollowness. His glory is immensely and exactly the reverse of mankind’s fallenness.
In Christ, in humanity, in the New Year, go forward.
That’s our mission.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that respect for the individual resides in the humanity of Jesus, not the mechanisms of society. Jesus seeks and saves.
December 30, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
Forward into the New
Year
By Bob Walters"The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which is lost," Luke 19:10
Jesus arrived in time, space and humanity with a clear mission. He came as fulfillment, truth, light, goodness, salvation and the only way to God. He’s also the ultimate answer to the ultimate question: What is the meaning of life?
Take a good look. HE is.
Jesus Christ, life’s author, presents humanity with the perfect answer in a complete package. Jesus isn’t just an idea to make us go to church. He’s not a myth to make us behave. He’s certainly not merely a “teacher” with good ideas and 2,000 years of mystically effective PR. He’s the perfect image of God because He is God, in whose image man was created in freedom and love.
As we privately diddle with New Year’s resolutions aimed at fixing some small corner of our human experience (lose a few pounds, drop a bad habit, pick up a good book, etc.), there is a better, great big way forward into the New Year found in accepting and reaffirming our adoption in and relationship with Christ.
Don’t imagine it’s divinely glorifying to divide the enormity of God’s grace into bite-sized bits of self-improvement. Don’t buy into the backwards, omnipresent, secular message that happiness is found within, and Jesus is something we can do without. Jesus is the human example of what glorifies God.
We forget that our goal is to be human because we ourselves are so busy trying to be God. We conclude Jesus isn’t God because He doesn’t always do what we want. There is great competition for temporal glory among fallen mankind’s appetites and insecurities. We know there is something bigger out there, and culture relentlessly suggests it is us. No, it’s bigger than that.
In Christ I can endeavor to be fully human, because Jesus is fully human. He’s also fully perfect because He is fully God. I’ll fall short of perfection in this life because I’m a lost sinner, weakened by the vagaries of this fallen world and beset on all sides by a cultural message that holds secularism – faith’s opposite – to be profanely, mundanely and inanely “sacred.” Large swaths of society consider sincere Christian sacredness – which is actually, truly and exclusively the province of the holiness, glory and love of God – to be naïve nonsense.
That’s backwards. God’s sacredness is as real as secularism’s hollowness. His glory is immensely and exactly the reverse of mankind’s fallenness.
In Christ, in humanity, in the New Year, go forward.
That’s our mission.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that respect for the individual resides in the humanity of Jesus, not the mechanisms of society. Jesus seeks and saves.
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