A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left this open to us. He did not intend to.In other words, Jesus will not be domesticated. But people still try. There seems to be something about this man for everybody. So we pick and choose in a way that shows he is on our side. All over the world, having Jesus on your side is a good thing. But not the original, undomesticated, unadjusted Jesus. Just the revised Jesus that fits our religion or political platform or lifestyle."
This quote is from John Piper's book Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. It caught my attention as I had been thinking and experiencing this theme recently as I read through Mark. After thousands of years of Christians reading the gospels collectively, and for the countless times I've read or heard the gospel stories over my own life, Jesus still remains surprising and catches us (and me) off guard. Have you ever read something in the gospels and thought, "That doesn't sound like something Jesus would say."? When that happens, it's an indication of how we are relating to Jesus. Too often I've been in the boat of trying to fit Jesus into my worldview rather than trying to adjust my worldview to Jesus. May Jesus continue to surprise us all.
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