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Jesus: The Center of All Things

By admin on Jun 01, 2011 in Encouragement

Partial Transcript:
Our problem is… (I take these [thick-lens eye glasses] with me everywhere I go.) [Put on eye-glasses] Our problem is we just cannot see it. It makes no religious sense to us. It didn’t make any sense to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were looking over at Jesus and say, “Jesus, your vision of God is wrong.” And that’s what we do. That’s what’s sin is. Sin is saying to Jesus, “Your vision of the Father, and your vision of the Spirit, and your vision of the relationship that you’ve established between the Father and the Spirit and the human race is just unfit – it’s wrong, Jesus, you need to repent.” Sin is insisting that Jesus Christ repent and change his mind and his vision, and come and line up with us in our darkness.

And Jesus says, I have come into the world as light so that you may not remain in the dark [remove glasses] but will see what is – what he has established in himself. So in terms of proclaiming the gospel, I want to make sure that people understand that you don’t begin with SEPARATION.

Jesus has established a relationship with you and he called you to walk in it. And he says, you can live in this [put on glasses] and you can insist on imposing your vision on the world, on your wife and children and people around you or even on your own denomination if you choose. But it’s going to be miserable as hell because it’s not real.

What’s real is the world [remove glasses] that the Father, Son, and Spirit has established. So faith is saying to Jesus, I want to participate in your way of seeing things, not my way [put on glasses]. And repent and say, Jesus rip these things off [remove glasses] quick, and reconstruct my basic vision, reconstruct my mind, renew it thoroughly, here it is, I don’t want to see things the way I see them anymore. I want to see things the way you see, I want to live with you in your world, I want to participate in your relationship with the Father, and your relationship with the Spirit, and your relationship with the human race and your relationship with the cosmos.

JMF: So repentance is seeing things the way they really are, it isn’t changing something that makes God change toward you.

It’s metanoia [the Greek word for repentance, meaning “change of mind”] It is a radical change of the way we perceive God, the way we perceive ourselves, the way we preserve the cosmos. It’s a radical reorientation.

Be transformed in your experience of life by the renewal of your mind, by the renewal of the way you see things. If you want to live in this [wear glasses] world, with its vision of God as the stainless steel holy version, and we are all sinners and broken and we can’t get to God and God doesn’t want us anyway. But Jesus is there and has opened the path – if we want to live in that world, we can live in that world.

But what Jesus is saying, No, come to me, come to me if you are heavy laden and I will show [remove glasses] you who the Father is, and you can live in my relationship with my Father with me. You can live in my anointing with the Spirit. You don’t have to achieve this, I give this, I’ve included you in this.
So that’s the dogfight of human history. I mean, if Jesus is not Plan B, as he is Plan A, then that gives me as a theologian a basic three-fold structure to human history: We’ve got creation or the beginning or preparation. You’ve got fulfillment in Jesus in his person, and now you’ve got revelation.

So human history is a time in which God is creating space and place for us to be, to live out our theories, to insist on our way [wear glasses] and to suffer the consequences so that we could come to know [remove glasses] as a race who God really is, who we really are and learn to participate in it, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. And it takes time. And if you’re a parent, you know it takes time for your children to come and see some things.

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Dr. C. Baxter Kruger is the founder and the president of Perichoresis. He obtained his doctorate working with James Torrance in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is author of