Understanding Jesus: Beyond Perceptions to True Relationship

The heart of the matter is how we, as individuals, perceive and relate to Jesus. Many of us may unknowingly treat Jesus in ways that reflect our human relationships—seeing Him as a harsh judge, a bailout, a buddy, or even a genie. These views can hinder our spiritual growth and intimacy with Him. Instead, we are called to recognize Jesus as He truly is: the Savior, the friend, the lover of our souls, who knows us intimately and loves us unconditionally. [00:05:52]

My concern is that for you and me we too often have a partially true view of Jesus and how we go to him and how we treat him. My concern for us is that in our view of Jesus we know the world's views and the various other religion views of Jesus are not right though sometimes partially true. My concern is for us how we regard him. [00:06:51]

Sometimes we treat Jesus like he's just a harsh judge, a judge under whom we can never, never do anything right. Some of us look at Jesus and we look at our God as one that is constantly ashamed of us, constantly upset with us, constantly angry with us, constantly just sad by the way we're acting who's never happy with us whatsoever. [00:07:20]

Some of us see Jesus and we go to Jesus sort of as a bailout or an enabler. We go to him when we get into trouble and we know that he always is going to be that sort of rescue line whenever we do get into trouble. And so we sort of live our lives in a way where we don't really strive after Holiness. [00:09:17]

Sometimes some of us we treat Jesus as if he's just a buddy. And a buddy is someone who kind of never tells us anything we don't want to hear. A buddy is someone who never really gets in our face about anything, kind of just leaves us alone. He's always there for you, you can always talk to him. [00:10:18]

A lot of times many of us tend to treat Jesus sort of like an influencer. We go to him because of what he can offer us sort of in an opportunistic way. We go to spend time with him or we are with him and his people in the church because it sort of gives us a network, a social network. [00:11:01]

Sometimes we treat Jesus like a relative, not a relative who's close that you talk to all the time that you love, but maybe one of those relatives and maybe, maybe you know this kind of relative, a relative that you love of course, that you know you're going to get a Christmas card from. [00:12:15]

Lastly, I think a lot of us treat Jesus like a genie, a Genie in a Bottle, and when we want something, when we really want something like a boyfriend or a girlfriend, a spouse, when we really want to get into that school, when we really want to do well on that test, when we really want to have a good relationship with our friend. [00:14:04]

The reality is friends is that every one of us in one way or another at some point in our lives we tend to fall into treating Jesus like this. We tend to go to him and we tend to visit him and we tend to treat him sort of in all these different ways like we have all these other relationships in our lives. [00:15:19]

The reality of it is is that most of us, we make Jesus in our own image. We take what we like from the New Testament and we sort of construct our own being of Jesus according to our own desires, our own sort of ways of thinking and our own ways of pondering. We make Jesus in our own image really. [00:16:06]

The older you get, the more you learn how much you need to run to Jesus. That's why older Christians shouldn't become more smug and more arrogant and more haughty; they should become more humble. That's why you, when you find older Christians who really, really have been Christians a long time, you'll notice something. [00:18:46]

Here's the good news: he knows your heart, he knows how wicked your heart can be, and yet he still loves you. That's who Jesus is. He is the lover of your soul, and he loves you even on days when you don't feel very lovely and you don't even love yourself very much. He's right there, so run to him. [00:22:38]