Which Jesus do you serve?

I was on my way to work the other day and heard a song by Todd Agnew called My Jesus. I don't know his theology, but this song struck a cord with me. I can see it in the church to a very large degree.

 

Some of his words go like this:

 

Which Jesus do you follow?

Which Jesus do you serve?

If Ephesians says to imitate Christ

Then why do you look so much like the world?

 

Cause my Jesus bled and died

He spent His time with thieves and liars

He loved the poor and accosted the arrogant

So which one do you want to be?

 

Blessed are the poor in spirit

Or do we pray to be blessed with the wealth of this land

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness

Or do we ache for another taste of this world of shifting sand

 

Cause my Jesus bled and died for my sins

He spent His time with thieves and sluts and liars

He loved the poor and accosted the rich

So which one do you want to be?

 

Who is this that you follow

This picture of the American dream

If Jesus was here would you walk right by on

the other side or fall down and worship at His holy feet

 

Pretty blue eyes and curly brown hair

and a clear complexion

Is how you see Him as He dies for your sins

But the Word says He was battered and scarred

Or did you miss that part

Sometimes I doubt we'd recognize Him

 

 Cause my Jesus bled and died for my sins

He spent His time with thieves and the least of these

He loved the poor and accosted the comfortable

So which one do you want to be?

 

Cause my Jesus would never be accepted in my church

The blood and dirt on His feet might stain the carpet

But He reaches for the hurting and despises the proud

I think He'd prefer Beale St. to the stained glass crowd

And I know He can hear me if I cry out loud

 

I want to be like my Jesus

 

Not a posterchild for American prosperity

but like my Jesus

You see I'm tired of living for success and popularity

I want to be like my Jesus

 

Some would be highly offended by this song, but if we are honest about the state of the church today, then we would recognise the modern church for what it is: another change agent for the world's great machinery.

 

Man has gone so far down the slippery slopes of recreating God in the image of man, that in the secular humanism of the day, they have ended up with man as god. The pity of this all is that the church is not that far behind.

 

In all of the theology preached from church pulpits today--even by those claiming to be evangelical (whatever that means today, who knows)--Jesus has been recreated in the image of its own peculiar interpretive devices. How many in the church would recognise Jesus if He stepped into our churches today? I would rather not guess at that percentage. It might just be too scary.

Many churches simply do not preach the whole counsel of God when it comes to the nature of God Himself. Rather, they are preaching only the parts they like and avoiding the "unlikeable" parts like the plague!

Many of these preachers claim to believe that the Bible is inerrant and that it is wholly the word of God to us; however, their actions speak louder than words!

If the church no longer preaches on the "undesireable" attributes of God's nature, but rather preaches the usual modern relativistic god of their own making, then they are no longer preaching the full gospel of God! Does a person that preaches a god like this indeed deserve to be called a Christian? If we do not believe in the full revelation of God as it is given in the Bible, can we rightly claim to believe in and worship the One true God?

If we only preach on the love of God (no matter how the concept of the love of God has been deformed by the modern humanistic mind) and do not include God's wrath, or the fact that He has destroyed civilisations, we end up with a god that is quite impotent, more akin to baal than the God of the Bible! We end up treating this god like we treat Santa Claus and not a Holy God that we should fear and love at the same time.

If we want real vitality as Christians (not the hyped up variety that comes from worshitainment style churches), we need to believe all that the Bible says about God, and to live as if we believe it!

Just thinking...