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| via Emily Jay photography |
I love Jesus. I’ve loved him since I was a little girl in a mushroom cut with round plastic glasses and pink sweatpants. He was there for me when I had no friends because we moved ten times before I turned seven. He was there for me when Mum was too tired from homeschooling and baking bread and granola and being a pastor’s wife. He was there for me when I starved myself for four years and nearly died.
But God the Father wasn’t.
I preferred the Son to the Father, because I was angry at my dad. My dad tried his hardest and I see that now, and I love him so very much, but back then I was a needy girl who wanted her dad to stop visiting church people and start paying attention to her, so I made up excuses for the God of the Old Testament with his wars and prophets and floods, said he’d been replaced by the sinner-loving Jesus, that he’d sent a peace offering and an apology with his Son saying, Let’s start over, shall we?
But then I met my Abba Father. I met him during three hours of healing prayer this past January and he took the little girl me in his arms–the girl who would stand outside her dad’s office and knock timidly on the door because it was Sermon Writing day–and Abba held me for the longest time and said he was the same yesterday, today and forever and that he loved me with an unrelenting, extravagant kind of love, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit bowed down and worshiped him. So I did too. Because he’s the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New, and he didn’t send Jesus to get rid of the old law but to fulfill it.
Jesus came with one purpose: to lead God’s people back to their Father.
And I’m scared for the church.
Because we’re sons and daughters who’ve lost their way home.
Because we’re saying things like, Give me Jesus but not the Bible.
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| via jadessong on instagram |
And here’s the thing: you can’t have Jesus without the Bible (tweet this).
You can’t have Jesus without the New Testament AND the Old Testament–without all of the war and flooding and all of those kings and prophets–because our Savior is the beautiful climax of an achingly real love story, in which a father sacrifices his only son for the sake of his creation, and we’ve stopped believing in the One who sent our Messiah.
We’ve stopped hearing the voice from heaven saying “This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased.” We’ve stopped seeing the dove.
And if we don’t know our Scriptures–if we don’t know our Father, the one who sent down fire from heaven, who provided manna in the desert, who anointed Esther and spoke to Moses from a burning bush and walked with Adam and Eve in the garden–if we don’t know him, then we don’t know his son either.
Jesus is not enough. He is only part of a three-part equation. We need God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
I know it’s not easy. I know there’s a lot of stuff we don’t understand, like why God would let women and children die and why the 400 years of silence and why Job had to lose everything, but faith is all about stepping into the unknown. And I think we’ve lost the mystery. We want to know. We want to grab that fruit from the tree because we doubt that God the Father truly loves us. We know Jesus did–after all, he died for us–but we’re missing the reason why he died.
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| via reckless youth on instagram |
He died because he was the Father’s sacrifice for us. God gave up his Son for us. That’s how much he loves us.
We’re missing that. We’re missing the sin that separates us from God which is the reason he sent his son in the first place. We’re missing the Good News.
I don’t want to miss it.
I want to know my Father.
I want to know the hard truth and to let that truth set me free.
For eternity.
Thank You oh my Father for giving us Your Son
And leaving Your spirit ’til the work on Earth is done
And leaving Your spirit ’til the work on Earth is done (Keith Green, There Is A Redeemer)