The word that best describes the motivation of Jesus and the heart of God is “splagchnizomai.” The Greek word is translated as compassion, or love and compassion, but it is more powerful than that. This type of compassion is an invitation into being more human while experiencing more of the divine. This episode will change the way you think God thinks about you!
I have noticed a vast difference…
A vast difference between being a Christian and being a follower of Jesus. Most people have an amazingly positive response towards Jesus, but when you ask them about Christians, well…the response is a mixed bag at best.
Take a moment and experiment with me. Launch a google search with the phrase, “why are Christians so…”
You will get page after page with responses like: “why are Christians so angry, mean, judgmental, hypocritical, hateful…” It takes a number of pages before you find a more positive response.
Here are the first 3 page that came up on my search which neted over 37 million hits:
In light of who Jesus is, how He interacted with all types of people, and how He modeled love on steroids, one might expect His followers to have the same impact, or leave a similar aroma with people, but the google results are in, and it isn’t favorable.
I am looking forward to the first conversation in my new series “What If?” where we will major on becoming more like Christ and less like the Google results!
“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
A picture is worth 1000 words…so the saying goes. Perhaps a visual theology speaks even more words than that! Welcome to my first image in a new project called Digital Theology. If you come across images that speak theological volumes please send them to me. What do the images speak to you?
