Getting it

My passage from Matthew today was verses 8:18-34. Go ahead, look it up. I'll wait...........

Reading these verses caused me to question whether or not I really get this Jesus I claim to serve. Part of the story is about the disciples and Jesus being in the boat during the storm which He calms with but a word of rebuke. I don't know how long the disciples had been with Him at this point but long enough to have heard the truth and authority of his teaching. Long enough, in my opinion, to have not much doubt left about who they were following and serving. Yet their question to each other following this event is, "Who is this?" But as I scoffed to myself at their denseness, I was quickly pulled up short by the thought that I don't know if I really know Him as I claim to either. In the earlier part of the passage Jesus has people desiring to follow Him, one of whom asks if he can just go and bury his father, then join the group. Jesus tells him to follow NOW. "Let the spiritually dead care for their own dead," He says. What? Certainly the Jesus I know and love would allow me to mourn the man who has raised me before leaving my family and home. Certainly he would not ask me to turn my back on those I have known and loved my whole life, right? RIGHT? What if Jesus is not who I have always painted him to be? What if all of my presuppositions and assumptions are completely wrong? I believe I have done an awful lot of creating of Him to be in my image rather than the other way around. I have fit him neatly into my life, culture, and comfort zone rather than truly looking at who the Bible says he was and IS. I always talk about Him as being so counter-cultural and how right-on that is, but do I really GET it? What that means? The sacrifice that following Him truly requires? I don't think I do. I think he is starting to open my mind to it and to show me. And I desperately desire to get Him. I know I have accepted Him and His salvation and therefore represent Him in my words and deeds. And I want to accurately do that. This is where that whole humility factor comes in. Admitting that my picture of Jesus may have been inaccurate all these years, that there's more to Him than I've ever set out to discover. And so I set out to discover it.