How Big is Your Jesus?

Luke 7:36 - 50 recounts the story of the sinful woman who comes in and washes Jesus' feet with tears, dries them with her hair, and then puts expensive perfume on them. When questioned by Simon over this behavior, He goes on to tell a brief story of two men.

41 “A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

Of course the one that was forgiven more loved more than the one forgiven less. The point that Jesus was making was that people who feel like they have very little to be forgiven tend to love Jesus very little, yet those that realize how much they have been forgiven love Him much more. 

The attitude that we carry today is very similar, but we are far more widespread as the one who has been forgiven little thanks to the message that "You are perfect just like you are" and "It's all about you." Let me put this idea from Jesus in a slightly different way. For most of us, Jesus tends to be only as big as the worst things you've been forgiven for. This is because we tend to believe only what our tangible experiences have taught us. Head knowledge tends to be meaningless unless we have had some kind of event to tie it to our hearts and make it real. 

Christians that have the strongest faith often have terrible things in their past. For some it was circumstances that they had no control over while others chose the path they went down. A fortunate number did not have to experience personal tragedy, but have been involved in significant events that there was no other explanation than that Christ Himself intervened to do something that should have been impossible. 

The reality is that Jesus had to dive just as deep into hell to pursue me as He did every other person out there, including you. One of the biggest issues that I had in my Pharisaical life was that I didn't really have a need for Jesus. Forgiving me for a cuss word wasn't that big of a deal. Checking out the women at the gym; it was only looking, I didn't touch. Training for triathlon instead of being home with my family; I was staying healthy so I would be around longer. 

Never did I think of myself as evil. I was a good person that sinned occasionally. Unfortunately, that is a lie that too many of us that call ourselves Christian fall prey to. You and I are born into evil and are evil by nature. Not just kind of bad, but truly evil. 

What is tragic about not coming to that realization is that it limits how big Jesus is to us. When He's forgiven the really, really big stuff, He's a really big Jesus. When you only feel like He needs to forgive the little sins, He's pretty small to you. The reality is that He's infinitely big, but you'll only begin to understand how impossibly powerful He is when you are able to see how impossibly lost you are without Him.

Why Christianity Can Be So Disenchanting

Romans 7: 21 - 24

"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am!"
You might be interested to know that the above quote is written by Paul about himself. Yes, that would be St. Paul. The greatest champion of the early Christian church. Author of half the New Testament of the Bible.

I was listening to my favorite Christian radio station yesterday and starting thinking about the lyrics of many of the songs. My mind also wandered to many sermons I've listened to. Well, the majority of songs and sermons actually. There's something very important missing from them. Something critical to the new believer and the would-be believer. Christianity doesn't make you perfect and it doesn't take away your desire to sin.
We hear all of these things about how we should live and think, how good God is, and about the amazing things He has done. It just doesn't seem to happen for us. That must mean we either aren't really a Christian, or maybe our sin is too great to overcome, right? Wrong, but it's very easy for me to see why it comes across that way. When people talk and sing, they pick topics that sound really good, but they leave out what Paul is discussing here.

In the above verse, Paul has just finished telling us that he does the things he hates rather than the good things his mind desires to do. This is the post-conversion Paul by the way. He's telling us that being Christian doesn't make you perfect or life easy. It makes life harder. You now have the Spirit in a constant battle against the sin you were born with. It's a fight that lasts your entire lifetime. It's only over at death.

Let me share this with you: as a Christian, you will still sin. You will lose battles. You will make a choice that is clearly the wrong one and feel guilty about it afterward. You will win over your favorite sin one day and lose the next. Christianity simply offers that when you mess up, Christ covers it. It also offers that the Spirit living in you will do battle against your sinful nature.

There will be improvement. You will feel moments that match what the songs and sermons say. They'll slowly grow more frequent and longer in duration. But you won't escape every form of sin. Every obstacle you overcome presents a new one. The Christian life isn't easy, my friends. Anyone who preaches health and wealth while ignoring the reality is a liar. No one should be telling you that it's easy, only that the it's worth it.