There are some good things going on these days around the world in terms of spirituality and a new openess to God’s work in the world. By good I mean that the seeds of the Gospel are no longer landing on barren rock. The soil of the human heart may be softening and allowing some of the gospel to take root.

 

It is a confusing time however as some who have chosen to re-embrace Jesus have done so by discarding His divine nature and embracing him solely as a great philosopher and thinker (which He no doubt is).

 

The danger in this is that Jesus as philosopher or great human being can save no one. Only the whole, complete Christ who is both God and Man offers salvation.

 

More on this later.

 

LATER: Well – I’m back. I’m not surprised that the world find Christ so compelling (and not simply the west either). There is no one like Christ in recorded human history.

 

Some things people have elected to keep in "their" Christ:

 

– pacifist, teacher, philosopher

 

Some things people have elected to discard:

 

– acceptance of the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament)

– resurrection

– deity

– teachings on morality

 

Christ is patronizingly seen as an intelligent guy worth setting up as an example. People selectively choose what they consider relavent about Him and then shove the rest into the category as historically and culturally irrelevant – essentially when something about Christ is found to be distasteful one simply needs to categorize that as part of ancient Jewesh culture and no longer relevant to me in the 21st century.

 

The effect of a selective reading of Christ is to neuter Him turning Him into a eunuch who serves our every emotional need but is essentially incapable of creating in us the new life which He has promised.

 

Our culture is rapidly stripping away the truth from Christ and transforming Him into Man and Myth. When this happens we are left with a toothless, memory hardly worth considering.

 

The living Christ is dangerous. A true encounter with Him leads to death. Death to self. Death to the world. But it also leads to new life and rebirth. Christ calls us to radical submission to His will against all our pride. One can serve Christ but one cannot serve a myth. A myth serves the culture that created it.

 

Examine your Christ. Have you stripped away His Godhood and created an idol? Is your Christ the Christ of scripture or of you own making? What difference does it make? All the difference in the world.