Jesus Is ______: Find a New Way to Be Human

by Judah Smith

Christianity is about Jesus.

If we could get people to think about Jesus, we reasoned, Jesus was more than able to reveal himself to them.

“Our mission: to show you who Jesus is.”

God doesn’t share our rating system. To him, all sin is equally evil, and all sinners are equally lovable.

It wasn’t what Zacchaeus talked about—it was the person he talked about it with. It was about being with Jesus.

How do we try to reach Jesus? We run faster and we climb proverbial trees of religious actions.

If we can’t be honest with ourselves, we’ll never be honest with God.

In the name of hating sin, the Pharisees ended up hating sinners.

Notorious sinners didn’t kill Jesus. Religious people did.

They sin. We just mess up.

Jesus didn’t care about the scandal. He cared about the scandalous.

Jesus isn’t just a friend of sinners: he is only the friend of sinners.

he modeled God for us.

We are often harsher judges than God himself.

since we all have a measure of badness, who are we to cast the first stone?

Jesus loves us right now, just as we are.

God transforms us one area at a time.

it’s not my job to convince people they are wrong and I am right. It’s not my job to change them. That’s a pretty arrogant approach to take anyway. When I see myself as a friend rather than a judge or schoolmaster, the relationship is a lot more natural.

when sin becomes more important than the sinner, an alarm needs to go off in our heads.

What they really need are friends who can show them who Jesus is.

We are all seated at a table, surrounded by other sinners, listening to Jesus.

That’s how we often react when grace comes at us. It’s awkward. God offers us something that’s too good to be true—unearned, unmerited, total forgiveness—and we stand there, stiff and uncomfortable, waiting for the embrace to stop so we can get back to the business of earning our way into heaven.

We are sons and daughters of God by birth, not by worth.

Love that over-came the father so much that he lost all good sense and set aside his dignity.

People who flaunt their sin in the name of grace don’t know what grace is.

Grace is more than a principle, more than an idea, more than a doctrine or dogma, more than a cover-up for sin. Grace is a person. And his name is Jesus.

grace and truth aren’t enemies. They are on the same side. We don’t need to balance grace with truth or truth with grace,

Jesus is grace, and grace is Jesus.

The point is this: some of us put too much trust in rules.

Rules are meant to lead us to relationship, not to replace relationship.

Fear of failure has a sneaky way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. We focus so much on what we don’t want to do that we are drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

everything that rules can do, grace can do better,

When you focus on a person instead of a set of rules, things fall into place.

Grace is God-given power to live differently.

Rules address behavior, but they don’t deal with the heart.

Where rules attempt to force us to do the opposite of what we want, grace actually changes what we want. It creates internal consistency and integrity.

Once you savor God’s goodness, sin holds no lasting appeal.

Pride is one of the greatest enemies of grace.

Don’t cheapen Jesus’s sacrifice by trying to pay him back.

Our righteousness doesn’t depend on our present performance but on Jesus’s finished performance.

We often approach sin backward. We try to control or diminish its effects, but we never deal with its internal power and shame.

We have to realize that there is more to life than sin.

unless it’s too good to be true, it’s not grace.

our failures become more real to us than Jesus.

Are you struggling with sin? You don’t need more willpower. You need more of Jesus.

Sometimes our brains are our own worst enemies because grace isn’t logical.

Because logic gets in the way when we talk about grace, we limit the scope, the magnitude, and the significance of grace.

Grace is Jesus, and Jesus is enough.

the Law was God’s provision to help people live better lives.

When Jesus came on the scene, people were stressed-out and worn-out trying to please God. They were so busy trying to do good in order to be good that they couldn’t see how good life was.