CN | Sharing + Speaking of Jesus Who is the Way

City Notes (CN): Books in 25 minutes or less

CN are more than a book review. They are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read. Here are the previous posts in the CN Speaking of Jesus series: Speaking of Jesus Part 1 and Part 2.

Chapter 9 | You’re Under Arrest … For Speaking Christianese!

"'Are you religious?’ ‘Oh, yes, I’m a Christian.’ There’s nothing in that exchange that says something about Jesus. Also, it doesn’t say one thing that is universally consistent. It means different things to everybody. To most Americans, the phrase born-again Christian means ‘conservative right-wing Republican.’ I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s the idea we want to be spreading when we use those words. ... The next time you want to invite someone to participate with you in your spiritual journey, bring him or her to something like an informal small group. ... describe what you do. Say that you and your friends are meeting to learn and you’re discussing Jesus and His teachings.” – pgs. 121, 124

" ... 'Why are so many Christians so weak in their faith and their walk?’ … 'I think part of the reason is that we tend to promote the evangelism method of spreading Christianity rather than the discipleship model of Jesus. We get people ‘in’ and then try to go out and get others. After a while, everybody’s ‘in’ and nobody has any idea how to mature in their faith.' Evangelism leads people to believe that it is a job done solely by evangelists. Therefore, very little actual evangelism, or whatever we’re going to call it, is ever done. Making disciples, as opposed to evangelism, is a journey of relationship that encompasses support, trial and error, and difficulty. ... Discipleship is a journey that requires change, whereas evangelism is just information. Information, in case you didn’t know, is pretty poor at effecting change by itself. Discipleship involves time commitment. If you love someone, you will spend time with him or her, talking about the things you love.” – pg. 126

Chapter 10 | Jesus the Folk Hero

“We seem to have forgotten the power and the humility and the sheer genius of Jesus, His vibrancy and His compassion … Jesus was the ultimate folk hero, a person of mystery and influence … (we) need the stories of Jesus like (we) need water and air. … I’m telling you this because I know how powerful and dynamic Jesus becomes when unleashed to live His life in the center of ours. We have forgotten how important it is that Jesus came as a human and lived a personal human life. While the cross is the favorite symbol of Jesus in the Western arena, to the Eastern mind, Jesus is like Robin Hood … He is the stuff of legend. He is the personification of a holy prophet, and yet a man of the people. He is a hero.” – pg. 135, 137

“Living a life like Jesus must begin with being a student of Jesus. This is the seed of discipleship. Because Jesus approached us, in our territory, in our skin, clothed in humanity, we must respect Him that way. We must realize that His approach as a man was not out of desperation; it was not plan B or just an off-the-cuff idea He and His Father thought of at the last minute. It was the great plan all along. And it was done according to prophecy, the way God had intended from the beginning. We must begin by respecting Jesus, the man. The Western church has made the mistake of deifying Jesus too quickly. It’s not that He isn’t God, or that He isn’t worth deifying, it’s that He waited for years before He revealed Himself to the people in that way.” – pg. 138

“ … all people thirst for the pleasure of hope … above all, Jesus was the embodiment of hope, the personification of a pleasure, which exists in a kingdom that hides behind the skin of this world. … Jesus did something humanly impossible while clothed in human skin. He offered real, lasting hope … Jesus was masterful because He brokered the hope of heaven while He lived on earth.” – pg. 139

“The really neat thing about accepting Jesus as a person is that it makes our experience with Him real. Living with a real person forces us to live honestly. Like in a friendship. Instead of living by some moral code, or conjuring up some spiritual state of mind, all we have to do is make our life about a relationship with a person. God has shortened the distance between us by coming here, and He has made the kingdom of heaven available in friendship form. By accepting God as a man, we are accepting the invitation of heaven as it is offered.” – pg. 141

Chapter 11 | Confused About Jesus … and That’s Okay!

“Struggle. What if struggling with Jesus is a part of Jesus’ plan? ... I think we forget that Jesus astounded the elders, teachers, and priests in the temple when He hadn’t even hit puberty yet. We forget that Jesus confounded the wise, humbled the intellectuals, and left the educated rocking on their heels with something to think about … Jesus would baffle me completely. Come to think of it. He does. One minute we’re not supposed to be angry, not supposed to even think about lusting; we’re supposed to love our enemies, pray for terrorists, and yet we’re not supposed to practice righteousness in front of people – so they won’t notice? I’m a bit confused. If you love your enemies, didn’t lust, and didn’t get angry with people, you would stick out like a sore thumb. He even said that our prayer lives should be a secret between us and God. The truest prayer is the one said earnestly when we are alone with God. When we pray overtly in front of others, it is easy to derail the genuine communion of our hearts before God and replace it with something that sounds nice, something that others want to hear or think impressive. Jesus commanded forgiveness toward others as a key component of being forgiven ourselves. In fact, He said, ‘If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins’ (Matthew 6:15).” – pgs. 145, 147-148

“Jesus’ way was a way of humility, a lifestyle of service without self-exaltation. It was the way of foot washing, the way of meekness, the way of preferring others, loving for the glorification of something bigger. 

“Jesus’ way was the way of big dreams. When He initially sent out the twelve disciples, He gave them a task that was much, much bigger than anything they could accomplish on their own. Jesus’ way required big faith. Jesus knew that giving His friends an unimaginable huge task would require their reliance on Him and inspire their passions, fanning them into a bonfire that would last long after He was gone. … 

“Jesus’ way was patient and kind. A cursory glance at the Gospels tells us it took the twelve disciples three years with Jesus and Pentecost before they understood, before they really knew what was going on. And yet, during His three years of ministry, we see Jesus’ impatience with the disciples only once or twice, and not because of lack of progress – because of a lack of faith. Jesus lived as an example of extraordinary patience. Throughout the Gospels, we see the disciples repeatedly asking dumb questions, making mistakes, and endlessly jockeying for positions in a kingdom they couldn’t dream of. Yet Jesus was kind to them, despite their immaturity. In fact, regardless of their hitches and glitches, Jesus encouraged His followers to take part in the discipleship of others.

“Jesus cared about reaching hearts, wounded, broken, crazy, stubborn, radical hearts. Different heartbeats, different pains. Jesus believed that faith did not necessarily arise from logical deduction, but from need, from pain, from hopelessness. …

“ … unlike the mystics of other religions, Jesus’ spirituality was inherent. He was it. He was the Way. Is the Way. Within His person He carried the kingdom of heaven. Paradise. Jesus believed in Himself, which drove His urgent call for others to believe in Him also. Jesus did not offer or endorse any other way, any other moral code except His own. Jesus was exclusively the Way. …

“It is a way of living while somehow dead, somehow lost to this world. Jesus’ way is a way of great personal cost and even greater personal pleasure. It is an economy of joy and pain existing in a life lived according to the values and priorities of Jesus. Self is no longer the most important commodity. Living in the wisdom and compassion of the true Way, the life of the Nazarene, is in itself a death of sorts. It is a daily ritual of surrender to the here and now of self-interest. In order to live like this, we must model ourselves after the Christ, pursuing relationships, compassion, and even reckless self-endangerment as a sacrifice to this person, this Way. Jesus’ way embraces this cost as a means of living in the pleasure of the kingdom of heaven. … It is a journey, it is a trail, it is a way. It is the only Way.” – pgs. 153-156

“…’My faults don’t keep Jesus from me, but they can keep me from Him … I don’t have to change for Jesus to love me. But I do have to change if I am going to love Him back … sin is sin. It keeps all of us from Jesus to the point where we prefer our way to His way.’” – pg. 166

“As soon as you get defensive, you prove your own guilt. And so it is with Christendom. When you fill your mind with all of the explanations, you are prepping for a fight whether you want one or not … there are millions of people who totally disagree with you. They may even think you’re an idiot, wasting your life on something you can’t see, hear, feel, touch, or taste. And as you go cruising down the interstate highway of life, you’re going to collide with these people: New Age practitioners, atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, etc. Your first inclination will be to defend Christianity, which, if you have read thus far in the book, you will know is the wrong thing to do. Once you attempt to defend Christian history, you will quickly find yourself in a very difficult place. If you do choose to defend it, you will be forced to take ownership of actions that you didn’t sanction and hopefully wouldn’t have performed. It’s simply better not to argue the point. ... What’s really intriguing to me is how simple it is to share Jesus with other people as opposed to trying to make ‘Christians’ out of them.” – pgs. 172, 174-175

“What if Jesus acts godlike and goes wherever He wants and takes people out of the box? What if He gives grace to sinners? What if He uses people like me to talk to people in the Hezbollah and the Hamas about Jesus? I find that if I come in and introduce myself as Carl the Christian, the conversation is pretty much over. You can’t build a real relationship or real bridge. So I come in and simply say I’m a guy named Carl and I would like to be friends, and I’ve been trying to follow a person, Jesus. I don’t even say I’m a follower of Jesus, because that seems too presumptuous, so I say I’m trying to follow Jesus. I actually said this to a leader in Baghdad: ‘We think Jesus is here because two thousand years ago, Jesus was always in the place where the religious leaders thought He shouldn’t be.’ Isn’t that true? He was always with the ‘wrong’ people at the ‘wrong’ time. As Christians, we’re tempted to think Jesus is ours and we have Him in a box. Then we’re frustrated when people allow Him out of the box. My prayer, encouragement, and challenge for you today is to let Jesus go. Let Him out of the box you have Him in. He’s bigger than our religion. This is not a message of theological universalism. This is a very practical point. I don’t think all ways are equal or all roads lead home. I believe each person finds the road through the Way Himself, Jesus.” – pgs. 176-177

Here are links to previous CN books: AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church; Life Together; A Meal with Jesus; Gospel-Centered Discipleship; The Art of Neighboring

Next post: CN | A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

– Sully
 
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