Is Your Jesus Too Small?

A few years back, Hollywood celebrities were wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase ‘Jesus is My Homeboy’. Ashton had one. Pamela had one. So, of course, I had one too. I was being ironically un-ironic, you see. I wore it around for a while, but then I stopped. It just didn’t feel quite right. Not that it’s wrong, exactly; the old-timer church song “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” is true. It’s just that this ‘Homeboy Jesus’ was, well, too small.

Is Your Jesus Too Small? pic As a kid, I knew that if I wanted to go to heaven when I died, I had to ask Jesus into my heart. Simple. But right into adulthood, my picture of Jesus basically remained the same. And I don’t think I’m the only one to have a stunted understanding of the Gospel. To put it bluntly, many of us view Jesus like we view life insurance: jolly handy when you kick the bucket, but mostly irrelevant to life here and now.

Could it be that our view of Jesus is too small?

“Jesus didn’t die so that you or I could live in heaven for eternity,” says Roshan Allpress, manager of The Compass Foundation, an organisation committed to helping people form a Biblically-shaped view of the world. Yikes. So was my Sunday school teacher lying to me? No, but the point that Roshan makes (along with notable Bible scholars like N.T. Wright) is that Scripture paints an even bigger picture of who Christ is and what He’s accomplished. Take Colossians 1:19-20:

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross.”

It’s easy for us to gloss over passages like this and miss what is being said, so let’s spell it out: through Jesus, everything in God’s creation is being put right again.

“If the good news of Jesus were carried in a newspaper today, it wouldn’t be hidden in the religion section. It would be a major story in every section.”

“It is a giant thing that God is doing here and not just the forgiveness of individuals,” writes Rob Bell, pastor and author (yeah, the guy who brought us the Nooma films). “It is the reconciliation of all things. It is the putting back together of the whole universe how God originally intended it to be”.

The message of Jesus doesn’t just have ‘spiritual’ implications; it has a huge impact on every part of life. “[Jesus] is the thing that changes everything,” Roshan says. Author Brian McLaren hints at the same thing when he says, “If the good news of Jesus were carried in a newspaper today, it wouldn’t be hidden in the religion section [although it would no doubt cause a ruckus there]. It would be a major story in every section…” Why? Because Jesus’ death and resurrection has big implications for everything – politics, entertainment, commerce, lifestyle, etc. – and raises questions about how we live in regards to all those areas. The Gospel isn’t just about what lies beyond the grave, it’s also about what Jesus is doing with every part of life: relationships, bodies, economies, hearts, nature, arts – the whole lot.

This isn’t to say that Jesus doesn’t offer us personal forgiveness or the promise of a perfect future – He does. It’s simply to say that Christ has accomplished something much bigger than we often realise. “To ask you to focus just on the story of my private salvation, which is pretty important to me, would be like asking you to focus on just one skin cell of the resurrected Jesus,” Roshan says. “What matters is the big picture”.

So why do we miss the big picture of Jesus?

“I think that our culture feeds us two big lies,” Roshan says. “Firstly, that life centres around individuals… The second big lie is that the physical world is somehow disconnected from and less significant than the spiritual world”. Individualism and dualism. Put those two together and you have a recipe for missing the point. And until we pull those lies apart, we might struggle to see just how big Jesus really is. So, with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at these two ideas.

Individualism. Our culture holds the individual as supreme. It’s a bedrock value for a consumer society (Burger King: ‘Have it Your Way’), but the flipside is that it also blinds us to the bigger story of what Christ is doing in the world. We come to Jesus with a me-centred attitude: What’s in it for me, Jesus? But I am not the point. Christ is the heart of the story, and the scope of what He’s doing is nothing short of cosmic.

Dualism. Westerners have a nasty habit of drawing a dividing line between the spiritual and the physical (called dualism), with Christians usually holding spiritual things as more important. The Bible, however, doesn’t subscribe to this split view of life. Scripture presents creation, both physical and spiritual, as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). When we fail to see this, it has a suffocating effect on the Gospel because it leads us to focus solely on the spiritual aspects of Christ’s work – saving lost souls – and leave out more earthy concerns like poverty, ecology and war. All are important.

In Scripture’s compelling future vision of the ‘new heaven and new earth’, Jesus says, “I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:5). The best part is He’s already started. And that’s not all: we get to be part of it. “Look around at any aspect of the world that we live in,” Roshan says. “Business, society, architecture, law, botany, automobiles, childcare, marine biology; Jesus is re-creating that. The joy of living the redeemed life is to participate in this ‘second Genesis’”. Every part of life is an opportunity to be part of Jesus’ redemptive work.

It’s time we set aside our small notions of who Jesus is and allow ourselves to be captured by the beauty, magnificence and sheer size of Christ and what He is doing. Knowing that Jesus is making everything new and that He invites us to play a role in that restoration job is staggering. Roshan imagines this story as a grand symphony, which grows quieter for a moment, and then, “…from Jesus, it explodes again. We are part of the explosion.”

Try our Vintage Spiritual Music and capture the magnificence of Jesus in your life.

For metaphysical supplies, books, candles, crystals, gemstones, herbs and much, much more go to The Magic Moon Store