Why You Cannot Be Spiritual Switzerland Part Two

What is it about Jesus that makes us so disdainful of His presence in our lives? Notice what the people at the crucifixion mocked Him for: His claim to be king. I think this is really the core of why we resist Him in our lives as well. Jesus comes as one who has given all that He could give to you, and invites you to a relationship in which He claims your total allegiance. The level of intimacy He invites you to, will naturally affect every area of your life. Just like marriage, Jesus calls us to an all or nothing relationship. What you do with your life, your money, sexuality, time, thought life, how to raise your children, Jesus says “that all needs to be decided by what’s best for our relationship.”

And part of us hates that. Because what is really going on in our hearts is a power play. We resent any threat to our autonomy, or the claims that someone else would know how we should live our lives. After all, I know best what will make me happy; who is this Jesus who is going to box me in and make me all religious? Who is He to have claim over my life? “I’ll maybe give you Sunday”, we say, “if you don’t push it.” And so we resist His saturation into our lives. You see, at the root of all sin and distance between us and God, is a deep resentment of His authority over us, and this claim of kingship. It’s rebellion. Insurrection. Revolution. As David Bisgrove put it, “Jesus says: ‘I am the center of all reality, and every part of you belongs to me.’ When we are confronted with that Jesus we hate it.” What makes you politely indifferent or even angry? We all “join the chorus of mark 15: crucify him. Get him out of here. In our nice polite way, we make Jesus dead.”

As long as religion stays nice and compartmentalized, we don’t mind it; it makes for nice neighbors and good charity work. But compartmentalized religiousness doesn’t acknowledge the reality of who God is or what He asks from you. The reality of God’s demands over a Christian are over the entirety of who you are, what you have, every thought, every hope, and every moment that you breathe because He both created you, and bought you back from His arc-enemy when you sold your soul away. “He {has} purchased {you} with His own blood” (Acts 20:28), “a people for His own possession” (Titus 2:14).

If you read the Bible, even briefly, there is no getting around this. God wants to not only possess all of who you are, He’s also not bashful about letting you know before you sign on the dotted line that He plans on completely re-structuring everything you’ve worked for and become. He uses phrases like ‘slave to righteousness’, and ‘the old is gone and the new has come’. There is no place for just being ‘kind of a nice person, most of the time, but only according to my belief system’ when confronted with the immense sacrifice and demand of Christ. He draws a line in the sand that divides people into the passionate followers, or the mocking insurrectionists. You can ignore the fact that He has created you and bought you back at a price; but the line in the sand is still drawn. And if you aren’t on His side, there’s only one place left to be.

Note: Many of these thoughts are indebted to a sermon preached at Redeemer Presbyterian Church by David Bisgrove entitled Mocking Jesus.