Hammer on Anvil '

Which Jesus do you follow? Is your Jesus kind and compassionate? If he saw you homeless, would he take you in? If you had a flat tire, would he help you fix it? Would he be the kind of friend who would be with you through thick and thin?

And maybe your Jesus wants you to be successful. He wants you to find the man or woman of your dreams. He wants you to find a job where happiness and good money intersect. Blessings aplenty will rain down from your Jesus.

Does your Jesus accept you just as you are? Does he smile at your triumphs and weep at your misfortunes? Does he stick around even when you’ve made a mistake?

The fact is, there is a little bit of Jesus in all of these things. He was an amazing man, is an even more amazing God, and has many attributes that we should strive to emulate.

But the thing is, how do you know what Jesus is like? I mean, sure, we all have this feeling that Jesus has all of the attributes that we associate with goodness and is against all of the attributes that we associate with badness, but how do you know beyond the feeling? How do you know that your feelings are leading you in the right direction? It’s possible that you think something is bad and Jesus actually thinks it’s good, or vice versa.

None of us is perfect, and we certainly don’t possess absolute knowledge of good and evil. And yet for some reason, we often live our lives as if we do. We all have strong feelings about certain things, and those are rooted in our feelings of good and evil. For those of us who are Christians, we often even imagine that Jesus would heartily agree with us on our strong feelings if he were here.

But do we really know if that would be the case? Unfortunately, all too often, our feelings about good, evil, and Jesus are the result of us hearing or reading about Jesus and choosing the parts we like while ignoring the rest. We might do this consciously because we refuse to believe that Jesus would be opposed to something we so adamantly believe in. Or we might do it unconsciously because we can’t understand why our version of Jesus would stand for this or that, and rather than alter our understanding of the nature of Jesus, we omit the part we don’t understand.

In the end, we need to strive to understand the REAL and COMPLETE Jesus. We need to pray for open hearts and minds so that we will be able to accept a change to what we thought was true when we encounter the real truth. And we need to read the Bible, because Jesus isn’t simply a culmination of our feelings of right and wrong; he is a real person, and we can’t learn about real people by just following our feelings about what we think that person is like.

Learn to follow the real Jesus.