Don’t Settle for Competence—Embrace His All-Surpassing Brilliance!

Last week I finally had the chance to read Jared Wilson’s book, Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior. This book is a really solid and challenging look at how we view Jesus and try to remake Him in our image. My one-line take on the book: it’s everything Vintage Jesus wanted to be but didn’t know it. Here’s one of the many reasons why:

The world does not regard Jesus as savvy or practical and, if we’re honest with ourselves, neither do we in the church. I think that our frequent failure to obey his commands stems essentially from a practical disbelief that he could really be right about how we ought to think and act. But if we really believe that Jesus is who he said he is, we know we have recorded in Scripture—and available at our convenience—the greatest human mind of all time…

Most of us today have to get into the habit of thinking of Jesus as competent in certain areas of life, but it isn’t enough that we settle for Jesus’ mere competence. We must embrace his all-surpassing brilliance. He’s not just a storehouse of facts or data; he is the wellspring of all truth. Jesus the Man didn’t just teach and live the truth; he was, as he said himself, the truth itself.

We have to get past an anxiety-prone existence in which we acknowledge Jesus’ moral perfection and good teaching and miraculous power but, perversely, not to the extent that we think him “in touch” with what we’re really going through. In one of the great ironies of our modern evangelical subculture, we are very big on “making” the Christian faith practical and “relevant,” yet by and large we go on living our lives as if Jesus had nothing relevant to say about what we do and say, who we date or marry, what sort of jobs we take, what sort of families we raise, where we spend our time, and who we spend it with.

We’re cool with Jesus being good and nice, but we’re hesitant to live as if he is omniscient as well.

Jared C. Wilson, Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior (Kindle locations 1659, 1726)