In times of difficulty, confusion, trial, or darkness the best thing to do, without fail, is focus on Jesus. I cannot count the number of times that I’ve said that salvation and Christianity are all about a personal relationship with Jesus. More than a religion, more than a set of doctrines of dogmatic statements, the core of Christianity is a dynamic and deep relationship with Jesus. My own personal testimony attests to this.
Even though I was raised in the church (and a good church at that!) I had to come to the place of needing to discover Jesus in the midst of my own human brokenness. This is one thing that Christ does for is—he reveals who we really are and puts to death our idea of who we are.
One of the things that caused a crisis of faith in my life was the testimony of the church. Today, I have a very high view of the church as the Bride of Christ, but in younger years, I looked at the church and said to myself, “Lord, I just don’t want to be one of those people. I don’t want to be a part of them. I don’t want to be like that.”
After a couple of years of resisting faith on these grounds, God revealed something to me (we can always trust God to be honest and to speak). In the midst of my critical judgment of others God said, “Matt, it’s not about you and them, it’s about Me and you.” This was the moment when everything changed for me. I realized with this truth that ultimately, my faith came down to me and Jesus. This was enough for me. When I came to the place of being willing to trust in Jesus and Jesus alone, to focus in on my relationship with Jesus and be willing to understand who he is and what he had to offer, that’s when I came to life.
It’s been a long time since then. When I reflect on that experience, however, there are a few key things that I think are important for me to remember. The first and foremost is that Jesus and nothing and no one else is the center of it all. A far second from this is that when I was judging Christianity, it was really only one or two individuals that I had in mind. We have to be careful not to think that one or two represent the whole. The reality was that most of the Christians I knew were loving, kind, disciplined, and authentic people who loved God deeply and were devoted to him. These are the ones for which I failed to account and it was my great loss. Third, and stemming from this, is that our perspective of others changes dramatically when we get our view of Jesus right. The reality is that outside of knowing Jesus there is just no proper way to understand how we relate to others. With Jesus at the center, however, grace and forgiveness become the points of reference for engaging people. I had a log in my eye and I was shouting about the speck.
In the end, what we have to get right is that Jesus is the center. We cannot lose sight of this.
