Looking Like Jesus…who didn’t look like anyone expected
I have a friend with a very checkered past, he lived through many-a hardship and temptation in his upbringing. In the years since giving his life to Christ and missioning as a fully transparent and committed man of God, he’s considered himself a “gangster for Jesus” - very Simon-Peter of him and I love him for it.
He’s bold in this self-labeling, which offers to merge his past and present, and he’s been very open to give vulnerable context for this title whenever he’s asked. I believe the shame and prideful tie he once had to his previous lifestyle was lifted when true relationship with God took form, and his eyes were completely unscaled to:
Who God is and what He desires.
How my friend’s war with difficulties, temptations, and sins actually makes him favor Jesus.
Imagine that.
This necessary lifting and unblinding should be available to everyone.
Christianity, however, can feel like the most high-minded of members-only clubs, and to an extent it is, but the risk with humanity’s involvement in God’s business is that we distort what He really wants from and for His children. My friend, even today, would find himself ostracized in some faith circles because of his past, and the lawless path by which he got to salvation. He kept no acceptable doctrines in his youth and he partook in no church traditions. Wayward walking was his path to Christ and he has no qualms with accepting that, but some of us aren’t willing to be that honest with ourselves…and I think I know a reason why.
Curl Check: “the world’s christian will try to dictate what God’s child is supposed to look like.”
Unfortunately, there is a misconception within the faith that works to shame us into failure-thinking. It asserts that there are certain means by which we can action our way into full purity, and that our coming to Christ should make us no longer weak to the things of our flesh - thereby taking away our confidence that God will accept us as we were and are becoming. It assumes that if we are found fighting battles against dark things a Christian is believed to not be weakened to, we are lesser than one of God’s desired children - but weren’t we equipped for battle and isn’t our weakness made strong in Christ? This misconception, a slithering ploy of Satan, creates an unattainable works-based checklist that scores our cleanliness and worth against man-created laws and requirements, when what we should be scored against is how we put our love for Jesus higher than our desires for self. No man is clean or worthy anyway, and aiming to be so is an exhausting and selfish feat (Romans 3:9-20; Hebrews 12:1-3). Aiming to love God wholly is the only way to look like Jesus, remembering that the existence of dark things (Mark 7:21-23) and our proclivity to them does not leave us once we’re walking with Him, but those things are tempered by our respect for and vow to God. We should acknowledge that, in part, we are made up of a dark self-centeredness, but communing with Christ helps us to not give into that dark evilness. We arrive at righteousness by His hands…not our own, and being shamed to think otherwise is neither biblical nor reflective of Christ.
My souled out friend still lives with his temptations and hardships, as most everyone does, but most importantly, he lives with Jesus.
So how does this relate to looking like Christ?
Well, belief and behavior are in question here. To truly mission to look like Christ, misconceptions that hold us to Law over Love must be thrown off, with us no longer shamed at our wars with temptations, sins, or difficulties, but grateful at God’s champion over them. Two instances in the Bible give insight into these needed self-evaluations: Matthew 26:36-46 & Mark 7:1-23
Checking ourselves against Jesus’s character:
Somebody wants to give in right now, that’s normal and understandable, but don’t…get up.
In Matthew 26, while in the Garden of Gethsemane, it’s made evident that Jesus was as great and perfect a Savior in the physical because He fought the grave difficulties placed before Him…with the Father. Christ had no internal mess, as we do, but in the perfect orchestration of our Father, He still dealt with difficulty. He still asked for a different means to fulfill His life’s purpose. He still wondered if there was another way, an easier way. In the torment of vv. 39-42, God provides this divine illustration of weakness - in all strength - so that we might recognize that difficulty with our own sin and temptation aren’t our separators from looking like Jesus, they are our bridges to Him. (read scripture) In all perfection, He showed us flaw. Dealing with and overcoming our hardships makes us identical to Christ. God is our strength in the presence of temptation, and in weakness is where Jesus continues His powerful work. We get up from our place of difficulty and we war. Warring makes room for our testimony of faith, and perseverance against shortcomings produces long-suffering.
Please know, deciding to give in to temptation, sin, or difficulty is not permissible. To put caveats and allowances in God’s mouth is the behavior of a little god. Perseverance is not to misstep repeatedly with self-excuse, but it is to fight on while turning the other cheek to what you really want to do. We can and have placed excuses for behavior with the lie that “God wants you to be happy. He wants you to go after your heart’s desire - no matter what or who it might lead you to.” If that were the case, if that is what God truly wants, He would have wanted Jesus to chose His own life, to rid Himself of the sorrow and anguish. So we must check that we are aiming for Jesus’s character of perseverance, and God’s commands of love.
Checking ourselves against God’s commands:
When you read my earlier words that said an aim for cleanliness is selfish, you may have wondered what’s so wrong with that? God wants us to strive for His perfection. Well, not really. He wants our righteousness so that He may give us His cleanliness. In Mark 7, Jesus was confronted by Pharisees as His disciples ate bread with unclean hands. They inferred that those unclean hands were undeserving of that bread - because uncleanliness had no place with God, right? So they asked Jesus why the traditions of elders were not being respected. In that time, as an acceptable purification ritual, when returning from the marketplace all Jews were to wash their hands before eating to rid themselves of the defilement of Gentile contact. As a result, they were able to remove the stains of their so-called filth. But after this temple practice left the exclusive use of priests, it lost its reverence and was less about Godly commitment. It became a high-minded members-only practice (sound familiar?) of striving for purity to the point of condemning the un-purified. They were clean by their own standards, but not righteous. It was a legislative way of determining the Jews’ level of obedience, true allegiance, and complete subservience to law, not Love. Unsurprisingly, hand-washing was not an offered tradition to Gentiles, of which we know Jesus came to serve as well - so He was absolutely going to shake up doctrine.
…and shake it up He did.
Doctrine: a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a Church.
The Pharisees’ questioning compelled Jesus to retort that as hypocrites (one who unconsciously alienates self from God, an ungodly person, an actor), they married themselves to the tradition of looking clean rather than actually being clean; faking joy, cleanliness, and purity rather than being lights of it; entertaining sin rather than extinguishing it's flame with the Word; hiding behind traditions & laws, which divide and demean, to cover up their unchecked relationship with darkness - in hopes that one ‘good’ action might omit the sting of another (vv. 6-13).
Sounds pretty similar to the present where weaknesses are hidden for fear of not looking like the Christ we have defined for ourselves. Just as we can and have placed excuses for our behavior, we can and have made laws and judgements on each other to be the determiners of our cleanliness. Both laws and excuses lead us to a selfish relationship with the Father that is all about us. So focusing largely on the outside and operating under a law-driven grace, when the inside is where purity matters, is the sure-fire way to giving sin and temptation more power. Our strive for cleanliness in front of man causes us to project into the world a Jesus that judges against unattainable requirements, demands one to not be tempted, tells us come clean or don’t come at all, and expects perfection from us. Which begs the questions: do we really know Him? Do we know what Jesus really looked like? Like the Pharisees, we’ve heavily equated Godliness to everything but the one thing that determines a likeness to Christ - one’s heart (1 Samuel 16:7).
Like Jesus, we aren’t to mirror the dark world, fallen church, or worldly christians. We cannot clean ourselves and we cannot speak for God. It gives us no allowance to endure with Christ when we do so. To reiterate, humanity’s involvement in God’s business has always created distortion, and historically placed an ‘either/or’ where there should be a ‘but’ - “either you behave this way or you’re not a Christian” when God has called us to say “we are this way, but God…”
Curl Check:
Do you believe that there are unwritten laws by which a Christian is subject? If so, what are they? Has the hold of looking the part caused you great stress and even greater temptation? Have you found yourself dishonest about your shortcomings or judging a sister or brother for struggling with theirs, because you have ‘doctrined’ what Christ looks like, and no one seems to resemble Him?
When we focus on our or another’s cleanliness, having the appearance of spotlessness, we actually spotlight ourselves. From Christian celebrities, to fallen pastors, gossiping prayer warriors, abstinent fornicators, to you, to me - we all will never clean ourselves or hide enough to look worthy, and God knows it. It’s time for us to accept it also. The shame of failure-thinking has become an imprisoned doctrine we cannot fulfill. What God desires, and has required since the Fall in the Garden of Eden is a loving commitment to Him, because focusing on Him DOES clean us and give us worth; we become tools that show His miraculous power to take the unexpected and purify it into something beautiful. To take an unassuming Nazarene and save the world. To raise a gangster for Jesus to teach, reach, and give reason for his past. To platform you to show that transparency of difficulty in relationship with God is to look like Jesus.
The power of God is to:
use dirty hands
clean our hearts
move us beyond traditions
spiritually & physically feed the starving
To say that God doesn’t want someone who is weak, tempted, or who falters in pursuit of Him, is to believe that God will not have us in our fallen nature, in our Garden of Gethsemane, and therefore we commit to secrecy, fig leaves over private parts, and strict tradition-keeping to look a certain way. We must check who taught us this, because it wasn’t the Father. He doesn’t want you to vainly worship an idea of Him that actually keeps you from the Bread at His table. Stop believing that you or anyone else can earn Life by washing your hands in anything but the Blood.
So,
Be truthful about your uncleanliness.
Be open to Jesus’ authority over darkness and difficulty.
Have regard for God’s command and honor Him above traditions.
The Father understands our dilemma of duality (Romans 7, namely 19-25); the difficulty we experience serving Him with temptations, desires, and hardships within us. He understands because He knows our hearts.
As Jesus continued to speak in Mark 7, this time to His disciples, "He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”"Mark 7:20-23 NIV
So…
"The stuff outside you, no matter how troubling, is not as dangerous as the mess inside you, and for that you have the grace of Jesus." - Paul David Tripp
And…
God makes the mess inside us very beautiful, even glorious.
I want to encourage any curlfriend that may be living a Pharisaic lifestyle, believing that keeping laws is the mark of holiness, and the Father requires a certain outward appearance to use, appoint, accept, and love you. Maybe lawfully abiding in Christianity has been your path while still living in lonely bouts of darkness is your struggle. Know this, Jesus wants the fullness of you, the realness of you, your complete nature so the great cleaning work He has planned - beyond what you expect and can do - will be done.
Jesus did not look like what anyone expected their Messiah to be, and the great work He did in spite of grave difficulty is what has brought us thus far.
So, if you are (fill in with your particular bout that God is championing) you may not look like a ‘Christian,’ but you sure resemble Christ.
Smile, Shine, and Love, Curlfriends!
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I love you, Curls!
