Jesus.
What do you think of when you hear His name?
What do you associate Him with?
I think of Him as a revolutionary.
Lately, as of the past couple days, the Lord has been giving me new depths of understanding of Who He is. The Bible says in James 4:8(a) "Draw near to God and He will draw near to you", and that's what I've been doing. I want to know God and His ways more than anything in the world. He is Faithful, every time, and He comes. :)
Those of you who have ever seen an episode of the 1980's sitcom "The Golden Girls" and are familiar with it, you know one of my favorite characters, the oldest character on the show, Sophia. She is sassy, silly, and just plain hilarious! She has this quote she says every time before telling a story, or a life lesson, and that is, "Picture it! Sicily... 19(whatever year)!" haha. And so I say... Picture it! June 2013!
I was in prayer one morning truly trying to understand and comprehend the way that Jesus does certain things. Let me back up by saying that I had just read a PHENOMENAL book, "A Hole In Our Gospel" by: Richard Stearns (highly recommend it) and it just got me thinking about a lot.
Jesus did things differently.
Everything about Him was revolutionary.
Think about it.
KING OF KINGS, LORD OF LORDS... CREATOR of ALL the Universe, everything!
He came to be human, first of all. He came as His own creation. That's cool. Secondly, He could have chosen to come down, if even at all, in so many different ways, but He knew, if He was ever truly to get us to see His way, He'd have to do things differently. :)
So, what'd He do?
Did He come down and dress in robes and flaunt His royalty? No.
He was born in a manger... around animal feces. And germs and bacteria.
Another royal baby is about to be born in England,.
It's England's next future Queen or King.
If the woman gave birth in a manger or a barn, could you imagine what the world would do today?! Oh my goodness! People would be going off the wall, y'all!
I think God knew that.
He knew He'd have to make Jesus come down here a little differently.
So, He impregnates a virgin girl.
Uh, who does that?
You can't just "magically" get pregnant.
It doesn't make sense in the natural realm.
But she did.
Thus the revolution began.
A baby boy, born of a virgin, born in a haystack among animals and their waste, to normal mortal human beings.
What?
Did you see that there?
I see 3 miracles flat out that automatically catch my attention.
Everything about Jesus was different! And is different!
How He interacted with people and with the religious leaders of His day is so interesting.
He challenged them.
The Pharisees and other religious rulers thought they knew everything about the law.
Jesus was constantly proving them wrong.
How?
...He did everything in love.
...Love.
Love is revolutionary.
He served them. He touched the sick and healed them.
Everywhere He went, He was constantly loving on people and met their needs.
That my friends is how we will change our world today.
Think about it.
In our world, we as human beings are sinful in nature.
Naturally, we want to do bad things and sin. Right?
But love is different.
Jesus was fully man, yet fully God.
Jesus was able to change the world, because He was God.
He came down as human to show us that through Him, we could, too.
1 John 4:8 says "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love."
When Jesus died by death on a cross, He took and bore our sins on Him, though He Himself had never sinned.
Being God, He was pure and holy.
What drove Him to do it?
...Love.
Because He knew that things would change.
He KNEW that it would catch the attention of the people.
Three days later, bam! He rose again.
He is seated at the right and of the Father and has sent us His holy Spirit.
We can change the world as Christ followers because we have the Spirit of the Holy King living inside of us.
If we are born again, we are born of God.
Since God is in us, we have the ability to love.
And if we have the ability to love, we have the ability to change the world.
Go get 'em, world changers. :)
