Living Beyond Ourselves (an excerpt from "Jesus Manifesto"

Living Beyond Ourselves
an excerpt from Jesus Manifesto
by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola

One of the most amazing but least noticed features of the New Testament portrayal of Jesus is its lack of interest in what Jesus looked like or His personality quirks. For example, what did Jesus' face look like? The Gospels don't tell. What they showcase is the way His face was spat upon, blindfolded, smitten, bruised for oursakes - all without any retaliation.

It is almost as if Jesus does not live out Himself, but beyond Himself ("I and My Father are one;" "As the Father has sent Me" "As the Father loved Me" "The Son can do nothing by Himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing"). Jesus less revealed who He is than who God the Father is, and what is beyond Him. For example, here is the message Mary was given for the apostles: "Go...... say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God'." How amazing is this? Jesus was saying that because of His resurrection and ascension, we share in Sonship with God; we have shared privileges with Him.

Jesus' sense of self is God-centered, not self-centered. Nothing He does is in the service of self, but in the service of God. The essence of Jesus' being is not His; He is continually receiving it from the Father. He lives in a state of empathy, in which one steps out of himself, which is the beginning of compassion, and steps into the sandals of others.

Could it be that those who are remade in Christ's image live in a similar fashion? We do not live from within but from beyond; we do not live out ourselves, but beyond ourselves. How did Paul put it? "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." So for a Christian to say "I am" is to utter something quite profound, even self-contradictory.

In John Milton's classic Paradise Lost, satan declares himself to be "self-begot, self-raised". That is satan's greatest lie and his greatest delusion - the delusion that lies behind a great deal of human disaster; the myth that we are self-made and self-raised. By means of every medium imaginable and every merchant of materialism (which are really merchants of the self), the evil one perpetuates the fantasy that we are self-begotten; he promotes our forgetting that it is God who has made us, and not we ourselves. The old cynicism that says that Americans hold nothing sacred is challenged by the realization that we do hold something sacred; the individual, the self.

Is your faith based more on a flaccid "What's in it for me?" than on pursuing your Lord and the concerns that He has?

Then turn your head away from the reflective pool before you drown in Narcissus Nirvana. Get outside of yourself and into Christ. In this way you will live beyond yourself and into Christ. In this way you will live beyond yourself to see others, not just yourself, and in seeing them you find yourself. (Maybe we need some "Drown Narcissus" rituals.....like a fast from "self-help groups" - a favorite oxymoron - or self-help books.)

Garrison Keillor says that there are only two ways to cure our "raging narcissism": (1) have children, or (2) move to a foreign country where people don't care who you are or what you do.

But Jesus says that there's another way to cure our "raging narcissism": starve our inner narcissist by forgetting ourselves and focusing on God.

Our problem is this: we have even created a narcissistic form of Christianity, in which "conversion" is less a turning toward Christ than a turning toward success or fame or fortune. Narcissus never had it so good than in the best-seller Christianity, which has become self-centeredness wrapped up as "spirituality", which has become the latest fashion accessory for the person who has everything. A survey of the Christian Book Association's best-selling books as we began the twenty-first century found that family and parenting topics accounted for nearly half of the titles, with the rest focused mainly on the self. Of the top 100 books, just 6 were about the Bible, 4 were about Jesus, and 3 were about evangelism. "The Christianity of the bestseller lists tends to be personal, private, and interior," wrote Gene Edward Veith, "with little attention to theology or to the church".

We have made conversion primarily about ourselves, finding of ourselves and a fulfilling of ourselves. We've made it a journey of self-discovery rather than a journey of God discovery. Yet conversion is not about us, but about God's overture of love, without which we are devoid of sufficient motive or power to change and be changed. True conversion is to lay hold of Christ, or rather, as Paul corrected himself, to allow Christ to lay hold of us. True conversion is directed toward the one to whom we convert, the one to whom we turn. It is a life of "fullness" in which the fullness is Christ.

You are not the point. And we are not the point. Jesus Christ always has been and always will be the point. All arrows point to Him and not to us.

Some reading those words may say, "Of course Jesus is the point. What Christian doesn't know that!" Well, Frank (Frank Viola) recently spoke at a conference and shared on the unsearchable riches of Christ. One person responded by saying, "I've been a Christian for over thirty years. I've been a worship leader, taught Sunday school, and was very active in minsitry from the day I believed on Jesus. I've served in some very large nondenominational, evangelical, Bible-believing churches. And for the first time in my life I now realize that it's all about Christ. This message is not being preached today."

This sort of response is very common when a believer gets a fresh glimpse from the Holy Spirit as to who Jesus really is in the purpose of God.

Robert F. Taft, perhaps the world's leading scholar of Byzantine liturgy, compares the worldview behind Byzantine art and architecture to the twenty-first century world view:

"Unlike in the past, people nowadays do not see themselves as finding their place in a scheme of things larger and - yes - more important than themselves. On the contrary, they see the larger reality in terms of how they can exploit it for their own self-fulfilment."

......in my own words........ if you have not yet gotten this book - I strongly encourage you to do so. It's message is a necessity for walking as a believer and understanding the will of God through Jesus. Jesus said "he who holds his life will lose it, but he who loses his life will find it".