“Christianity’s primary selling point: Believe these doctrinal points about Jesus, and in exchange, you’ll receive life after death. Heaven has become the product, belief the price of admission. And in the process, we’ve reduced the Messiah to a mere ticket agent and his primary function to checking our ticket to make sure we can get through heaven’s gates.”- Kyle Idleman and Mark E. Moore
“The time has come,” [Jesus] said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.”- Mark 12:15 (NIV)
As Kyle Idleman and Mark E. Moore move on in Chapter 1 of The Missing Messiah, they observe that we design our customized Jesus primarily to make us feel good. Yet, the authors caution, placing our hope in an artificial Jesus produces a baseless hope that fails under pressure. Consequently, we hold to a “Flat Stanley” faith. Very convenient for carrying in our pocket and useful for selfies. But not a faith to build our lives on.
In addition, Kyle and Mark argue, this equation serves as the dominant formula of modern faith. The formula: Believe in Jesus + Improve yourself = Get to heaven. Thus, payment takes the form of intellectual assent. Therefore, this formula encapsulates and compresses faith into ensuring our eternal destination.
Hence, Kyle and Mark wonder:
“What if the most dangerous misunderstanding about Jesus isn’t found in secular culture but within our churches? We’ve mastered getting people ready for heaven while neglecting Jesus’ invitation to bring heaven to earth. When Jesus taught his followers to pray, ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matthew 6:10), he wasn’t offering a pleasant liturgical phrase; he was articulating the heartbeat of his mission.”
So, the authors ask, in our efforts to make Jesus accessible, have we made him unrecognizable?
Today’s question: How do we move people beyond simply seeing the Messiah as a mere ticket agent? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Eternal life = depth of relationship”