We’re continuing our devotional look at each phrase in the Apostles’ Creed.
“I believe in Jesus…”
If we Christians could somehow eliminate our infatuation with Jesus, we could be friends with so many more people. There are people out there who really love some of the things we stand for. Our morals (not all, mind you, but some of them), our care for the poor, our insistence on love, our integrity, our pursuit of justice.
But then it never fails. You get into a conversation with one of these Christians, and invariably they have to go and blow it by mentioning Jesus Christ, and how he’s the “only way”, and bla-bla-bla.
What people fail to realize is that it is Jesus who gives all the substance, meaning and power to our morals, love and integrity. You take away Jesus, you deflate everything we stand for.
Christians do not go to Jesus in the same way a sick person goes to the doctor. My wife Janis needed pain pills for a back injury suffered shortly after we arrived in California. We went to an urgent care clinic to see a doctor, and could have cared less if it was Dr. Zhivago or Dr. Strange. As long as somebody scribbled their initials on a piece of paper, we would be happy.
But Jesus isn’t like that. For a Christian, Jesus is both physician and medicine. We go to Jesus in the hope that he will prescribe a way of living for us that is good for us. And the teaching of our Lord is certainly that. But that’s not enough. There’s a sickness in our souls that keeps us from carrying out the prescription. There’s a strange madness within us that causes us to do shameful, harmful things.
We need a medicine that will free us from our sin and shame. For Christians, Jesus is that medicine without whom we would never be made whole. And this is why Christians are forever carrying on a love-affair with him, saying things like “I believe in Jesus” and really hoping that you will too.
