Join us for our GOOD FRIDAY SERVICE at 6:30PM!

 
(Directions)

You Need More Jesus

Brothers & Sisters,

            You need more Jesus. Me too. We simply cannot have enough of him, and we never will have had our fill. Still, so often he seems to fade from our sight. I was recently encouraged by Michael Reeves and his book Rejoicing in Christ to remember that Jesus is my very great reward. Reeves wrote:

 

Even for Christians, overlooking Jesus is easier than falling off a log, it seems. We instinctively think of God, life, grace, reality with rarely a pause to have Jesus shape what we mean by those things. We can even have a “Christian worldview” and find Jesus is but an interesting feature in its landscape; we can even have a “gospel” and find Jesus is just the delivery boy who brings home the real goods, whether that be salvation, heaven, or whatever. But that must change if we are to take seriously the fact that he is the beloved Son.

First, if there is nothing more precious to the Father than hum, there cannot be any blessing higher than him or anything better than him. In every way, he himself must be the “very great reward” of the gospel (Gen. 15:1). He is the treasure of the Father, shared with us. Sometimes we find ourselves tiring of Jesus, stupidly imagining that we have seen all there is to see and used up all the pleasure that there is to be had in him. We get spiritually bored. But Jesus has satisfied the mind and heart of the infinite God for eternity. Our boredom is simple blindness. If the Father can be infinitely and eternally satisfied in him, then he must be overwhelmingly all-sufficient for us. In every situation, for eternity.

Second, his sonship—his relationship with his Father—is the gospel and salvation he has to share with us. That is his joy. As the Father shares his Son with us, so the Son shares his relationship with the Father. That is why in Matthew 11:27-30 Jesus first says, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (v.27), and then says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (vv.28-30).

 

[Michael Reeves, Rejoicing in Christ (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2015), 21-22.]

 

I pray that Jesus would be “overwhelmingly all-sufficient” for us this day, and every day.

 

Warmly in Christ,

Mike