Will the real Jesus please stand up, please stand up, please stand up…

Last night at ‘Redefine‘, as explained in last week’s blog post, we started our teaching series looking at the person of Jesus: ‘Jesus is…‘

It was a fun night, with a great talk by our director Mr Tim Gough, as he looked at so many people around the world and throughout history have been influenced by Jesus. He also spoke about how if you google ‘Jesus‘, or look Him up on amazon etc, you can get some pretty strange results.

You’ll find things such as Jesus action figures, which include Him riding a motorbike or surfing a wave. There are bobble-head Jesus‘ for your office desk or car dashboard. T-Shirts and posters with Jesus being used to endorse things such as drugs, guns, tacos & coffee. There have been many films made of Jesus, with different actors portraying Him. He has been depicted in Art & Literature; and He has been adopted by many other faiths and ideologies.

However many of the portrayals of Jesus are far from accurate. It seems like they think the idea of having Jesus is great, but a Jesus that can be shaped to fit their needs, instead of the real Jesus; A sort of ‘have it your way’ Jesus.

He is adopted for their cause and altered to suit their ideology. This is instead of discovering for themselves who He truly is.

The real Jesus is not represented, and for many people it can be confusing to know who the real Jesus is.

Hence the title of this blog post, which is inspired by the title of Eminem’s ‘The real slim shady song’, where the chorus for the song is ‘will the real Slim Shady please stand up.’ Most of the lyrics for that song are highly offensive and I’m not endorsing the song at all, but the whole idea that it gives of a famous person being imitated and moulded to suit the needs of the person that is using their image, is one that does fit. So many people do that with Jesus. Fitting Him into their mould instead of being influenced and changed by Him.

“Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” – Romans 12.

We can be guilty of doing that with Jesus too.

We want Jesus to fit our mould and be safe and comfortable instead of coming to Him as He truly is. Coming to Him as the King of kings and Lord of lords. Coming to Him humbly and being willing to get to know the real Jesus.

When people do get a wrong picture of Jesus it’s because they move away from the source. They don’t hold onto the truth of the Jesus that we find in God’s Word; the Bible. As Christians we believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that if we want to know more about God, then we need to go back to the Bible and read it.

Many other faiths and cults as I shared last week, recognise Jesus, but He is not the Jesus that you would come to read about in the pages of the Bible. They have their own ideas of who Jesus is. Not the Jesus of the Bible.

He is not God. He is not the Saviour of mankind. He does not redeem us from all our sins. He is not enough. He is often just an add on.

I remember once a pastor talking to me about other faiths and cults and how as a Christian, the best way to discern truth for error is the same as how you study to be able to discern whether money is real or counterfeit. You do not study all of the ways a currency can be counterfeited he said; you study the real money so well that you know when something isn’t genuine.

Because you are so familiar with a genuine banknote, you can spot a fake a mile off.

It is the same with Jesus.

We need to get to know the real Jesus by reading about Him in the Bible and spending time talking with Him in prayer.

This is why we are doing this teaching series. We want the young people to know the Jesus that we meet in the pages of the Bible, and have an opportunity to respond to Him (see Romans 10)

To finish, I’ll leave you with a video made to accompany the inspiring words of Dr. S.M. Rockridge as he waxes lyrics about his King; Jesus.

Be blessed!