Making room for Jesus
Moving Christ from the margins to the center of faith
I've been reflecting again lately on the need for our faith in Christ to be the central and defining theme in our lives. So very often, faith can be very easily pushed to the margins. When this happens, faith becomes part of life’s periphery, rather than occupying the heart of our existence.
We all have a tendency to compartmentalize faith, to separate it from daily living, rather than allowing it to become the message that orients our every word and action. When this happens, faith can lose its meaning and significance.
If Jesus is Lord – He has the right to tell us how to live. @bruxy Click To TweetInstead, Jesus summons each of us to a faith that demands our everything. He calls us to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength – with the entirety of our being. When this happens, and it is a daily liturgy, Jesus will take center stage.
Bruxy Cavey once said that if “Jesus is Lord, he has the right to tell us how to live.” When Jesus is Lord, he stands not on the edge of faith, but at its center. He becomes more than something we try and make time for in the midst of our busy schedules, but instead determines what the rest of our schedules should consist of.
Jesus isn’t something we try and squeeze into our lives, but should occupy the very center of our lives, affecting everything we do.
Heart, mind, soul and strength.
Breadth, length, height and depth.
Everything.
Christ at the margins of faith
When Jesus is not Lord, we are, and everything else will take precedence. When this happens, we lose. We push Christ to the margins of faith. Church community loses its appeal and significance. We attend and participate in kingdom-related things, but only when we have time. If we don’t, we don’t. Yet, at what cost?
Following after Christ means being his student. We are pupils of Jesus. He seeks to reproduce himself in us as his apprentices.
We do not drift into discipleship. @DallasAWillard Click To TweetAs students, we take his words and actions very seriously. We don’t reduce him to an ethics teacher ora political revolutionary. He may be these things, but is also so much more. He is Lord and King. And, we live as members of his kingdom. As members, we learn how to interact with other members within the kingdom, as well as those in other kingdoms.
His is an all-encompassing message. It’s all or nothing. As Dallas Willard once said, “we do not drift into discipleship.” That is, it isn’t something we just fall into. It isn’t an automatic process that just happens. We purposely and intentionally live Jesus-centered lives, everyday, and in everyway. His school has no graduation ceremony.
Jesus’s call is one that says, “if you want to find out what it means to live, give your life over to me. Stop living for yourself, and begin to live for God and the other.”
Jesus calls every person to a life of radical otherness. Click To TweetWhen self-absorption, defined by the mantra ‘it’s all about me’, is allowed to take precedence, it will foster radical individualism; which is the exact opposite of Jesus’s command to ‘give your life away.’
Instead, he calls all people to embrace a life of radical otherness; to a life where God and the other person becomes the focus of our attention. To live in any other way usually leads to a faith that is empty and aimless.
Follow me means just that. Walk in my footsteps, listen to my teachings, reflect on my actions, then go and do likewise. In other words, be a good apprentice.
Maybe we need to stop ‘making room’ for Jesus and give him the place he deserves – the very center of our lives. Then and only then will he have the room he needs to build us into people that look and sound like him.
Jesus be the center.
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