Jesus Is ______: Find a New Way to Be Human

by Judah Smith

Jesus is not your accuser. He’s not your prosecutor. He’s not your judge. He’s your friend and your rescuer. Like Zacchaeus, just spend time with Jesus. Don’t hide from him in shame or reject him in self-righteousness. Don’t allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him for yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

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

We just have to remember that rules are not proof of our spirituality. If anything, they are proof of our sinfulness, a reminder that we have a tendency toward wrongdoing and that we need help.

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

You don’t have to be good to be Jesus’s friend. You just have to be honest.

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

Society already condemns them. Their own thoughts and guilt and shame torment them. What they really need are friends who can show them who Jesus is.

As we walk with him, we will sin less, and so the effects of sin will lessen too.

We get so introspective and self-absorbed that our failures become more real to us than Jesus. It’s not healthy. It’s depressing. It’s morbid. It’s selfish.

The point isn’t to quit thinking about sin. It’s to quit thinking about self and to think about Jesus. It’s to become God-conscious, not me-conscious.

If Jesus wrote in your yearbook, I think you would be blown away by what he really thinks about you. I think you would live differently because Jesus is crazy about you. He is obsessed with you. He is proud of you.

“Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world”