Recently the gross sexual immorality of Ravi Zacharias has come to light. Unfortunately, he joins an already well established collegium of famed Christian teachers whose integrity has crumbled. Any sin is terrible and any act of assault is an act of injustice. I grieve for his victims. I grieve for Ravi’s family and followers who now must reassess his legacy. Many are disillusioned as well they should be. Ravi’s teaching was profound and he was a passionate speaker but it is clear that he did not abide by the ethics he taught. His morality was an illusion.
These reckonings ought to be a wake up call to us; we are all human. As much as we would like to leave people safe on the pedestals we have constructed for them, our tendency to exalt intellectuals, brilliant scholars, or good looking celebrities does not elevate them past their humanity.
People were even offended at the humanity of Jesus, of all people.
“Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?”… And they took offense at him.
Matthew 13: 54 & 57
Now here the offense is not that Jesus committed some abhorrent sin, the offense is that He is God with skin on. He possess the wisdom and power of God and has the audacity to exude it in the likeness of man.
The truth is we want God to be God and we want people to be God. But we are far less interested in God becoming a human being. It’s so messy, dirty; we want to be hide of all the earthly muck that bogs us down.
Jesus does not come to us that way in the Gospels. In fact, He does not even present the afterlife to us in purely spiritual terms. Paul makes it clear in 1 Corinthians 15 that we can expect physical resurrection bodies. Matter is not some temporary impediment to our spiritual journey. Jesus is not interested in mundane tales of agricultural merely because they serve a useful function as a jumping off point for spiritual discussions; Jesus is interested in mundane agriculture because He wants to infuse every mundane aspect of our lives with the extraordinary wisdom and power and joy that is in Him.
So yes, your day today may be all too human. Filled with meals and emails, temper tantrums and tedium, it is easy to imagine our lives too messy, too mundane… too human, for God to care about them. Yet He does. And He knows our own sinfulness. And He knows the injustice we visit upon others. And He wants to bring His power to bear on this world we dwell in, to set it right, to renew it.
Lord, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
bonaccordcommunitychurch.com 