You've probably heard it.  Perhaps you shook your head and smiled to yourself.  Or maybe it made you angry.  I'm talking about "Christianspeak".  It's the language many well-intended Christians use to describe their Christian experience.  The problem with Christianspeak is that it's use can be a circular proposition.  The terminology describes something that is difficult to understand unless you've experienced it. 

Consider the term "saved".  A non-Christian hearing the term might ask "saved from what?"  It's a simple term for a complicated topic.  It can mean saved from one's sins; or it can mean saved from oneself.  It can mean saved from the natural consequences of my actions.  But fundamentally it means one's eternal salvation.  Until you've actually experienced salvation, from a Christian perspective, it's very difficult to understand what it means.  And it's harder still to describe it.  But I can tell you as a Christian that I'm saved, and when I think about it, it's a pretty incredible condition to be in.

I understand how use of the term can irritate non-Christians.  First of all, many people don't think that they need to be saved from anything, much less themselves.  And to add insult to injury, Christians tell them that there is only one way to be saved- through Jesus.  But before you get mad, just understand that Christians are simply relating what the Bible tells them that Jesus said.  He said that He is the only way. 

You might argue that this is simply misinterpretation of Jesus' words.  But I would argue that He didn't leave any room for misinterpretation.  Read the gospels.  I think you'll agree that Jesus claims were uncategorical.  And that may be why they are hard to accept for some people.  Most of us subscribe to some sort of ethical framework based in "fairness".  And it just doesn't seem fair that God would create such a narrow path to eternal salvation.  It seems more fair that He would create a system in which our good works would be weighed against our bad deeds.  And if the good outweighs the bad, then we get a free Heavenly pass.  We reap what we sow.

The problem with this framework, however, is that it rests upon a bad assumption.  Reaping what you sow assumes that we begin life with a net zero balance.  In other words, it assumes that from the moment of our life, our cosmic scale is in perfect balance.  Our ledger of life is clean of any debits or credits.  The fallacy with this thinking is simple.  God gave us our lives.  So, in truth, we begin life with a pretty large debit balance- God's gift of life to us.

And of course, it only goes downhill from there.  We consume.  We need.  We use all kinds of bad ways to get those needs met.  And the deficit balance only grows.  At some point in our lives, we may begin to act selflessly.  Selfless acts certainly reduce the deficit.  But could you ever do enough good to pay God back for your very life?  About the only way that I can think of would be to somehow sacrifice your own life in His service.  Do you know anyone who has done that lately?

I can only think of one person.  His name is Jesus.  Granted, He lived and died on earth long before I got here.  To conclude what I have about His life and death, I must rely on the documentary evidence, the Bible.  The Old Testament describes a savior who bears an eery resemblance to Jesus (Old Testament prophecy is pretty fascinating stuff.  If you want a taste, read Isaiah.  Look for references that describe Jesus birth, life and death).  The New Testament describes His life.  I also rely on the testimony of witnesses.  They tell me what they believe and the impact of it, and Him, on their lives.  I rely on the evidence in my own life.  I read the Bible.  I follow its instruction.  And it works for me.

There's one other piece of testamentary evidence upon which I rely.  The book of Acts indicates that after Jesus died and ascended into Heaven, He returned.  He wasn't in the same form that He assumed during His earthly existence.  It was in the form of a spirit, the Holy Spirit.  Jesus called it the "Comforter".  Christians believe that when we become Christians (that is, we tell God we are sorry for what we have done with our lives- essentially a deficit sin balance; we accept the fact that Jesus paid for our sins- we believe in and trust in Him; and we promise to follow Him going forward- making Him the Lord or our lives), we become indwelt with the Holy Spirit.  In other words, God comes to live within us.

The Holy Spirit ultimately validates all of it for me.  I read the Bible and He teaches me through that reading.  I pray and He "speaks" to me.  This is another misused "Christianspeak" term.  Non-Christians hear it and for them, it confirms everything.  Christians are certifiable.  They hear voices.  They're crazy.  But when God speaks to me, I mean it metaphorically.  If you've seen the movie, "Raiders of the Lost Ark", you know what happens to people who are exposed directly to the power of God.  I'm talking about the Nazi officer who is carrying the Ark of the Covenant and accidently peeks into its contents.  He melts instantaneously. 

I suppose I just offended my conservative Christian friends with the foregoing analogy.  But I think the point makes sense.  God is so great, and so powerful, that I imagine a direct communication from Him, unfiltered, would probably have a severe and undesireable outcome.  At least in this life.

So, when Christians talk about God speaking, it's not audible.  Instead, He speaks to me through the Bible (His Word) and through the circumstances of my life.  He causes things to come together in such a way in my life as to continue to propel me through all of it, in such a way that I continue to become remade more and more in His likeness.  I have to continue to trust in Him for it to work.  And I have to continue to obey Him, at least as best as this miserable little human shell that I live in will allow.

More importantly, He speaks to me through the life of Jesus.  I believe that Jesus was God's Son.   Jesus is that filter through which God communicates to mankind.  He shows us that God loves us and wants to take care of us.  He shows us that God loves us so much, He was willing to suffer crucifixion and to die for us.  So, Jesus really is the only Human who ever lived who actually did end up with a credit balance on His life.  And He invested that credit balance in each of us.  It's sort of like giving us an envelope containing a check for deposit in our eternal bank account.  The check will  pay our way into Eternity.  Christians often refer to it as a "free gift".

The only question remaining is whether we will accept it.  We can cash the check.  Or we can leave it in the envelope.  

Deposit the check.  If you're not sure how, send me a message.  Or I'm guessing God has placed someone in your life who can help.  Look around you- they are there, just waiting for you to ask.  And by the way, so is He.

And have yourself a Merry little Christmas.

I love Christmas.  There are just so many good things about it.  A lot of people complain about the crass commercialization of the holiday.  But even so, the underlying goodness of Christmas is there.   For most people, regardless of their spiritual beliefs, Christmas is a special time of year.  At Christmastime, something magical happens to us.  We ease up a bit on the metaphorical gas pedal of life.  People are kinder to each other.  And of course, we buy gifts and spend time with family and friends.

During the Christmas season, the old classics abound on television-  “Miracle on 34th Street”,  Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” are a few of the shows that we love to watch and share with our children.  For the record, I’m a big television documentary fan.  I don’t like sitcoms. I don’t like variety shows.  But I’ve always watched documentaries.  Shows about history, and different places and people fascinate me.  But there is something that has begun to happen this time of year that bothers me.  It’s a certain genre of “religious” television shows.  I’m not talking about holiday shows.  I’m talking about the Jesus “reality” shows. 

There has been a trend over the past few years for some of the documentary channels to focus on the “historical” Jesus.  You’ve probably seen at least one of them.  A typical show will present the archeological “record,”[1] in order to give the viewer insight into what Jesus might have looked like and how he might have lived.  They retrace the steps Jesus may have walked and the places He may have visited.

These shows tend to focus only on the humanity of Jesus.  Some shows have gone to great lengths, using computer graphic techniques, to reconstruct what He might have looked like.  These representations are based upon what a typical Galilean male of the era would have looked like.  Others focus on how He might have grown up and the effect it might have had on His ministry.  In those days, many Jews struggled for bare subsistence.  They were essentially a captive people and many dealt with poverty and itinerant lifestyles.  They led very hard lives.  There was a huge divide between the “haves” and  “have nots”.  Jesus is portrayed as a “have not” based upon where He grew up and his circumstances, as described in the Bible.  The Jesus we see revealed in these shows is an unattractive, uneducated and deprived Jew, who barely scraped by.

These shows impute the circumstances of that time, for a typical male Jew, from a typical Jewish family, to Jesus.  Perhaps this representation of Jesus is accurate.  The underlying theme throughout these shows is that we are all a product of our environment.  If we grow up in a class-based system and are on the wrong end of it, we will rebel in favor of the “have nots”.   And that is the problem with these shows.  They inevitably want to lead you to the conclusion that Jesus was a product of his environment.  His teaching and preaching was also a product of that environment.

These shows and those positing these theories tend to portray only the human side of Jesus.  But they ignore and presumably reject the other side of Jesus, His divinity.  In other words, these theorists are willing to accept only part of the New Testament accounts of Jesus as accurate.  The problem is that you can’t have it both ways.  If parts of these accounts are inaccurate, then we must question the accuracy of the entire account.

Jesus, of course, was human.  But then again, we are talking about Someone who was a very atypical human.   Christians believe that Jesus was also the only Son of God, which of course, would make him also much more than human.  According to the biblical accounts, Jesus did some pretty fantastic things.  He somehow converted large amounts of water into a very fine and rare wine.   He restored sight to blind people.  He healed demoniacs.  He fed thousands from a few loaves of bread and pieces of fish.  He predicted His own death (and the manner of it).  He walked on water and calmed storms.  He brought dead people back to life.  And He himself was raised from the dead, after which He stayed with His disciples for 40 days and ultimately, ascended into Heaven as they watched.

Candidly, it’s just hard for me to imagine Someone like that barely scraping by, in a dirty longshirt, speaking in Aramaic uneducated slang.  I’ll admit that it’s unlikely that He looked like the blue-eyed Jeffrey Hunter in the movie “King of Kings.”  But I don’t know for sure what He looked like.  The New Testament accounts don’t tell us.  Contemporaneous secular literature doesn’t either.  And as to His socioeconomic status, I have no idea where He landed in the Jewish hierarchy.  I’m pretty sure that money and wealth were unimportant to Jesus.  If He was who He said He was, He created all of the wealth in the entire world, and it therefore belonged to Him anyway. 

I think what was really important to Him was reaching through to you and to me.  We’ll never know why his earthly ministry was so short in duration.  But its impact is nothing short of miraculous.  Contemporary mankind began measuring years by the year of His birth.  What began as a defeated little band of men and women, whose Leader was humiliated, tortured and crucified, ended up as a belief system that is followed by more people than any other in the world.  And even those who don’t follow Him, in more cases than not, celebrate His birthday.

There is really only one way to know who He was[2] and what He stood for.  We read His teachings in the Bible.  We test the validity of those teachings through our own life experiences.

The Old Testament is filled with prophecies of the coming Savior of the world.  The list of these prophecies is sufficiently long as to be the subject of a separate blog post (or perhaps a series of blog posts).  But when you read them, I think you will come to the same conclusion that I did- the only reasonable explanation for their fulfillment is as described in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as described in the New Testament.  Jesus taught that He was the only path to God.[3]  He explained that we must be born again, in order to have eternal salvation.[4]  And all we have to do is believe in Him.[5]  That’s all He asked of His followers at the time; and that’s all He asks of us today.

Here’s how I test the validity of Jesus’ teachings in my own life.   It’s simple, but perhaps the most convincing evidence that there is.  This is empirical evidence in its purest form.  I know what I was like before I trusted in Jesus; and I know what I’m like now.  The “now” me is supernaturally better.  It’s not because I try harder now to be good.  Frankly, the harder I try, typically the more I mess up (also a point validated and written about extensively by Paul in Romans[6]). I’m better because Jesus, in way that is almost impossible to articulate, now lives within me.[7]

Certainly, if Someone gives me the gift of eternal life in Heaven, I’m going to be grateful. I’ll want to please Him.  And that’s where the old Christian hymn “Trust and Obey” comes in.  We ask Him into our hearts.  We trust in Him.  And we desire to obey Him.  But it’s the trusting and not the obedience that saves us.  He saves us.  And His Holy Spirit provides us with the tools we need to obey- love, peace, patience and all of the rest of those qualities[8] that just don’t come naturally to most people.

And the effect of Jesus on my life is the bottom line.  What He looked like, how He dressed and spoke, and how much money He had simply aren’t important to me.   And focusing on these things about Him completely miss the point.  It’s sort of like focusing on one toenail of the Statue of Liberty, or one rivet in the Eiffel Tower.  If you do, you will completely miss the experience.  You won’t see the big picture.  You won’t understand the intent behind the work.  So, watching a Jesus “reality” show may be theoretically interesting.  I suppose it’s kind of fun to imagine what His life may have been like.  But then again, we are talking about the earthly life of the Creator of the entire universe, who is an eternal being. 

Here’s a suggestion.  If you are channel-surfing over the holidays and one of those shows comes on, turn it off.  Open up your Bible to Matthew, Mark, Luke of John.  Instead of hypothesizing about whether Jesus had blue or brown eyes, read about Him firsthand.  Read what He said.  Read about what He did.  Then come to your own conclusion about who He was.

I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.



[1] I use quotation marks around the word “record” because, as with anything historical, it is subject to interpretation.  For some reason, we humans tend to attribute a greater degree of credibility to anything that purports itself to be scientific.  But the truth is that scientists make as many mistakes as anyone else.  And so do archeologists.   And because something is presented as scientific or archeological evidence, it does not mean that the evidence is necessarily valid, or even supports whatever proposition it is intended to support.  Instead, all evidence should be weighed, in order to ascertain the truth about a matter.  If the evidence is consistent with the theory or resonates based upon prior experience, and it is authenticated through an independent and unbiased process, then it may be considered as relevant and perhaps even as dispositive of the matter asserted.

[2] More correctly, “who He is” because it is fundamental to Christian beliefs that Jesus has never died.

[3] John 14:6.

[4] John 3:7.

[5] John 1:12

[6] Romans 6-8.

[7] John 14:26, Romans 8:9.

[8] Galatians 5:22.