5 Things About Jesus That We Need to Emphasize

The reason that I am a Christian is because of Jesus. There are many other interesting religions and some wise religious and philosophical teachings but Jesus is unique. I try to focus on Jesus as much as I can.

Some people seem to think that the only message we need is “Believe that Jesus died for you and you can go to heaven.” The biblical description of Jesus is much more complex.

Here are five things about Jesus that I believe that we need to emphasize:

1. Incarnation. Many Christians (especially apologists) see the greatest need as proving that Jesus was divine. That is important but we can easily lose sight of the humanity of Jesus. The first great heresy of the church was not those that denied Jesus’ divinity but those who denied his humanity. It is incredible how often in the New Testament we see both the humanity and divinity of Jesus being held together. Jesus was not God pretending to be human but rather God and human at the same time.
2. Kingdom. As someone who has heard many preachers, I will confess that I rarely hear sermons on the kingdom of God. That is strange as the cornerstone of Jesus’ preaching was not the atonement on the cross but the coming of the kingdom of God. We need to return to kingdom thinking and living.
3. Inclusion. Why did so many religious leaders dislike Jesus? One of the main reasons was that Jesus spent too much time with all the wrong people. We need to take time to think about why he did that and how that might shape who we are in community with.
4. Cross. It seems like the cross is the front and centre of most Christian reflection. While theories of atonement are good for us to look at, we can easily miss another aspect of the cross. The scandal of the cross is the fact that God chose to operate from a place of weakness rather than strength. The stumbling block was not a particular theory of atonement but the claim that God’s Messiah could actually die on the cross and still be considered worthy of worship.
5. Resurrection. Jesus rose from the dead. But why? For some people, all the work was done on the cross and the resurrection is little more than tagging on a happy ending to an otherwise sad story. The resurrection was much more than that. The resurrection was an eschatological event. The resurrection of Jesus is the first step toward our own resurrection. We need to be thinking more about the role the resurrection plays in God’s big picture.

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