Over the course of my life there have been several times when God has made me aware of what He has been teaching me. When He first brought me to repentance and I understood my need for forgiveness at age three, when I learned the need for continued repentance and commitment during adolescence and most recently as He has been taking me through the humbling transition from Pharisee to Follower.

The process for me has been a journey through various terrains and has moved as various paces and recently the rhythm has quickened as I have read through The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey. In this book, Yancey steps outside of his North American, Evangelical mindset in order to look at the life of Jesus as His contemporaries would have reacted to Him during the time of His incarnation.

It is always jarring to me to take a step back and once again honestly look at Jesus’ life to find the example for my own. While I learned several lessons from this book, perhaps the most striking (at the moment anyway) is how drastically different my heart and attitude is from His and with that comes the reminder that where we differ, I am wrong.

Once again I am overwhelmed by the love, grace and patience of Jesus that He is willing to come alongside me and teach me how to be more like Him. I am thankful that He is patient when I am slow and stubborn to learn from Him. Finally, I am thankful that though He is holy and I am profane, in love He came down to my level so He could elevate me to His.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book, though I advise everyone (Christians especially) to buy their own copies:

“I remarked to the class how strange this pattern seemed, since the Christian church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most suspicious of Jesus on earth. What happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus’ day? Why don’t sinners like being around us?”- Philip Yancey

“Grace is absolute, inflexible, all-encompassing. It extends even to the people who nailed Jesus to the cross”- Philip Yancey

“With crystalline clarity Tolstoy could see his own inadequacy in the light of God’s Ideal. But he could not take the further step of trusting God’s grace to overcome that inadequacy”- Philip Yancey

“Don’t judge God’s holy ideals by my inability to meet them. Don’t judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name” -Leo Tolstoy

“The Sermon on the Mount did not help me improve; it simply revealed all the ways I had not” -Philip Yancey

“Living on a planet of free will and rebellion, Jesus often must have felt ‘not at home’. At such times he went aside and prayed, as it to breathe pure air from a life-support system that would give him the strength to continue living on a polluted planet” - Philip Yancey

“The Messiah was not going to save the world by miraculous, Band-Aid interventions: a storm calmed here, a crowd fed there, a mother-in-law cured back down the road. Rather, it was going to be saved by means of a deeper, darker, left-handed mystery, at the centre of which lay his own death” - Robert Farrar Capon

“Religion, not irreligion, accused Jesus; the law, not lawlessness, had him executed. By their rigged trials, their scourgings, their violent opposition to Jesus, the political and religious authorities of that day exposed themselves for what they were: upholders of the status quo, defenders of their own power only. Each assault on Jesus laid bare their illegitimacy” -Philip Yancey

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful” -Flannery O’Connor

“Ironically, our respect in the world declines in proportion to how vigorously we attempt to force others to adopt our point of view”- Philip Yancey

“Passing laws to enforce morality serves a necessary function , to dam up evil, but it never solves human problems. If a century from now all that historians can say about evangelicals of the 1990s is that they stood for family values, then we will have failed the mission Jesus gave us to accomplish: to communicate God’s reconciling love to sinners” -Philip Yancey

“There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned and oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won”- Will Durant

“the Jesus I met in the Gospels was anything but tame. His searing honesty made him downright tactless in some settings” -Philip Yancey

“Could we be perpetuating an image of Jesus that fits our pious expectations but does not match the person portrayed so vividly in the Gospels?”- Philip Yancey

“In that act of transformation, God took the worst deed of history and turned it into the greatest victory. No wonder the symbol never went away; no wonder Jesus commanded that we never forget” -Philip Yancey

“Nothing - not even the death of God’s own Son - can end the relationship between God and human beings”- Philip Yancey

inothernews2:

1. When you lack the ability to receive correction

2. When you boast, “I only listen to God and not men”

3. When you have an inclination to see the wrong in other people. (Fault finding is not a fruit of the spirit)

4. When you feel you’ve been appointed to fix other…

In an earlier post I told of how God opened my eyes to the reality that I was not following Jesus but rather a strict, unforgiving legalism similar to that of the Pharisees who so adamantly opposed the Rabbi. Since this epiphany, God has been taking me through a sort of detox for my addictions to legalism and religious piety. There has been many things He has used to help me on this journey but one that’s stood out the most was when He taught me to seek Life Transformation rather than Behavior Modification. It is Christ who takes us through this Heart Changing Process and we cannot do it without Him.

This is critical to Christianity but so many times we forget it. Instead of introducing others to Him so they can allow Him to transform their lives, we begin trying to convict (guilt), them into turning from their sinful ways. Conviction is the role of the Holy Spirit in people’s hearts but guilt is how Satan keeps people chained down, imprisoned in their sin. Conviction leads to repentance and is immediately followed by forgiveness that eradicates guilt. Guilt, on the other hand, makes people ashamed so they try to hide their sin and the deeper they bury it, the more the roots entangle them.

Sometimes, trying to remind people of this truth is tiring and difficult so it brings me great joy when I meet others who are also preaching and teaching it. David Murrow is the author of Why Men Hate Going To Church and recently I have been encouraged and inspired by his book. He’s blunt and succinct but thoughtful and deep. Most importantly, he understands the value of Life Transformation over Behavior Modification.

“Jesus’ message was one of repentance. To repent is to do a complete turnaround. The old man dies; a new man is born. Unfortunately, many teachers focus on moral improvement instead of total repentance. This was the method of the Pharisees: changing men one sin at a time. Erect enough laws, and men will be righteous. This brand of incremental moralism makes men resentful. They see it as nagging. It’s far more effective to call men to life transformation than it is to target specific sins. Once a man is following Jesus, he will accept moral instruction because of his transformed heart.” -David Murrow