Back in the 1980's there was a well known credit card company that ran a popular ad campaign that featured a familiar but not totally recognizable celebrity asking the question, "Do you know me?" I hadn't thought of that ad in a long time until His Spirit brought it to mind a few days ago. When He did, He connected it to the easily bypassed scripture above. Bypassed by our flesh, and small wonder. It presents a Jesus who is in conflict with the pop-culture Jesus put forth in a great part of the church today. A Jesus that Mark Galli calls, "mean and wild." A Jesus whose first call and desire for us is not to affirm us, promote us, prosper us, but to come to Him......and die. Die to everything in our lives that is not of Him, that we might come to live in all that is Him. More than this He wants us to know that to refuse this bears consequences that will echo down through eternity and carry a cost too terrible to countenance. The cost of our very soul.
It has always been my desire to speak and write words of life, encouragement, hope, and faith. It is never my desire to wound, yet the reality is that I cannot speak His words of life in all their fullness and not wound. Wade Taylor once said that we need to stop asking God to help us, that He wants to kill us. By that he meant that we want the Father to help, rescue, increase us, while the "us" remains unchanged. God is not interested in such an arrangement. He wishes to kill the "us" centered in the pride of the flesh so that He might bring true Life in the "Us" of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We want Christ as Savior, Caterer to our every desire, and a Retailer who provides all the goods we need. He commands that we receive Him as Lord, Master, King. From the scripture above, there doesn't seem to be an in between state. Yet in between is where too many seek to live today. Israel lived there. Between Egypt and the Promised Land. His Word called it the wilderness. How many of us are living there right now?
I'm not trying to present a Christ of no mercy, no love, no understanding of our weakness. He is not any of these. But neither is He a Christ who winks at our consistent sin, our refusal to receive the fullness of not only His Life, but His Lordship. And our stubborn insistence that we not only have our own way, but that He stay out of our way in the meantime. Neither am I saying that we are expected to live perfect lives. Growing in grace is a process, and there will be failures along the way. That is not the same as making conscious choices to walk against the Light we've been given in order to satisfy our own desire, or accomplish our own will. To do so will bring about a reckoning. I pray that for those who walk in this way, that reckoning come before that day when we all stand before Him. Make no mistake. All of us will. The day will assuredly come when there will be the question, "Do you know Me?" It will not be a life of good works that gives proof to our answer, but whether we lived our lives in surrendered obedience to Him in all things. If our persistent life choices have been to walk in our way rather than He who is The Way, according to His Word, the only end can be to hear, "Depart from Me. I never knew you."
I close with one more line from that above ad. At the end, the featured celebrity would give the name of the card and then say, "Don't leave home without it. "Beloved, you may think of this world as your home, but one day, you will leave it. The choice before you, before each of us is, will we leave it in His hands and life, or our own? Jesus Christ. You cannot come Home without Him.
Blessings,
Pastor O
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