The Jesus You Can't Ignore

``There is one who sees it already. There is one who knows you all the way down. You can be fully known. You are fully known. And despite knowing the real you, with all your warts, with all your sins and imperfections, knowing the real you, he still loves you. [00:27:13] (25 seconds)  #FullyKnownFullyLoved

No. Scripture won't let us accept that as the true Christ. Jesus is not merely a good moral teacher. He's not merely a good moral man. He is those things, absolutely, but he is god of gods. He is the only true god, and he sees us for who we are. He knows us fully and truly, and he loves us in knowing us. [00:05:33] (21 seconds)  #JesusIsStumblingStone

This is what the lord is saying to us. He is an obstacle. You can't go around him. You will either trip and fall over him or you will stop at him and embrace him. He is cornerstone, a rock of offense, a stumbling stone. This is the part of the gospel which clashes with Canadian sensibilities and our national preference for politeness at the expense of everything else. [00:20:26] (30 seconds)  #JesusIsLightAndDivider

We all face this temptation. If if you share about Jesus and you have an atheist and an agnostic and someone of some other religion and they all walk away from that conversation totally content in that peace and believing that we're all friends, then somehow your presentation of Jesus has been a rather innocuous presentation, a rather benign, and I would say, unfaithful description of the lord of lords. People are not put off by a nice Jesus. Contemporary humanism is well prepared to accommodate a Jesus alongside of a Buddha, alongside of a Mohammed as merely moral examples, not a Jesus who is the lord of lords and the king of kings. [00:18:20] (45 seconds)  #StumbleOrStand

The great divider. He is going to split people apart. He is going to represent a crossroads in the life of every single person on this earth. He's going to be the kind of individual around whom people will find it impossible to remain neutral. [00:08:13] (22 seconds)  #RunToChrist

Here, the gospel is according to Simeon is that there is one to whom I must run, and if I don't run to him, I will fall over him. And today, everyone needs to understand this is good news. One way or another, you will understand yourself in light of who Jesus is. There's no ambiguity. There's no confusion. There's no doubt. Christ is lord. [00:20:56] (27 seconds)  #StopDilutingJesus

Because you see, when Jesus is presented merely as a spirit in which we can all meet and gather together rather than as lord, lord of lords, and king of kings whom we must obey once we shift it from something concrete and personal, us standing before a holy god, once we shift it to some big rather ambiguous spirit of peace in which all men can come together, then anything goes. [00:16:51] (31 seconds)  #EncounterAtTheWell

The conversation has started simple enough. Two individuals found themselves really at the wrong place at the wrong time, but in god's providence, it was the right place and the right time. She drawing water from a well at high noon when she should have been there earlier in the morning. Him, a Jew passing through Samaria at a time history in which Jews had nothing to do with the Samaritans. They meet at this water well and Jesus begins to speak to this Samaritan woman and her strategy is to dodge, evade, deny, conceal, admit nothing. [00:03:05] (38 seconds)  #HiddenInShame

The woman at the well discovered this. She, her whole life, had been running from man to man to man. We don't know the reasons. We don't know the exact circumstances. We know simply that it was wrong. She is now so covered in shame that she finds herself gathering water from the well at high noon during the hottest part of the day in order that she can avoid people because she is ashamed. She doesn't want to be seen. She doesn't want to be known. [00:28:12] (34 seconds)  #HeKnewMe

Jesus comes to her in that moment, and he says, if you actually knew who was talking to you, you wouldn't be drawing water from this well. You'd be asking him to give you water that gushes over to eternal life. She runs away. She says, come and see a man who told me everything I had ever done. Couldn't this be the Christ? [00:28:46] (31 seconds)  #ExposedToBeHealed

Here's the good news. Jesus is the one who reveals to us our sinful hearts. He draws it out of us. He reveals to us what our truest nature really is. God does not will to sin, but he wills that when there is sin in the human heart that it must be exposed. It must be revealed so that it can be healed. [00:25:04] (34 seconds)  #LovedDespiteSecrets

He presses her. He talks about how he has water of salvation. She dismisses it as ludicrous. He talks to her then about real worship. She begins a theological debate regarding whether you should worship here or whether you should worship there. And then he really gets her attention by saying, go and call your husband. [00:03:43] (23 seconds)  #JesusDemandsADecision

Whatever her motivation may have been, whether she was always chasing after that thrill of fresh romance and going from man to man to man, or whether she was simply trying to survive going from man to man to man. Whatever her motivation, whatever her reasons might have been, it was still still sin. [00:04:12] (19 seconds)  #FalseChristCentered

prophecy in Christ's own ministry revealed to us that there is something vastly different from a Jesus who could be comfortably accommodated in polite circles versus the Jesus of the bible who drives men crazy and forces a decision. That's what Simeon is talking about here. [00:11:52] (24 seconds)  #ComfortOverConviction

Does that statement make any sense then? We are Christ centered. We preach the king of kings, the lord of lords, the one true god, but we don't want anyone to believe in him. That's not Christ centered church. This is this is anything but Christ centered even though they might call themselves Christ centered. [00:13:50] (24 seconds)  #WhyJesusIsExcluded

Now here's where it should be deeply concerning to you and me. When he had finished, there was an awkward silence from the assembled crowd and nothing else. As a Christ centered prayer breakfast, the prime minister of Canada could stand up, not read the Bible, and the event simply continued. No one stopped it. No one protested. No one disputed. No one insisted that the word of god be read. The practice simply went on. [00:16:09] (42 seconds)  #TheyInvertTheCross