"Shake it off, don't take it so personally" can be good advice in some circumstances especially when someone is acting on the behalf of another, such as in evangelism. And why should somebody not take it personally when another person has just slammed the door in their face as he or she tried to share the story of Jesus? As you know, the person was not rejecting him or her, but the Lord. Since this is true, have you ever given thought as to whether the Lord takes some things quite personally?
Does the Lord ever take it personally?
Yes, there are several examples. We find one very enlightening occasion in Acts 9. In Acts 9:4, Jesus asks the young Saul why he was persecuting Jesus. Up to that point in time, Saul had never even seen the Lord. What had Saul been doing? He had been aggressively persecuting individual members of the church. But the Lord viewed the persecution of these members of his body (that is, the church - 1 Corinthians 12:12-13; Ephesians 1:22-23) as being a direct attack upon himself. When someone attacks an individual disciple because of his or her commitment to Christ, our Lord takes it personally.
There seems to be another situation where the Lord also takes it rather personally. Once again, this involves how a person treats another human being. When people fail to attend to the legitimate needs of the poor, those needing security, those suffering with illnesses or those locked away in prison, Jesus says, "I was in need and you did nothing to help me." Matthew 25:42-43.
A third text reveals how the Lord takes it very personally when someone falls away from serving him. In Hebrews 10:29 those who have abandoned gathering together to worship with the saints are described as trampling the Son of God under foot and treating Christ's blood as an unholy thing. In other words, to disregard meeting together is more than simply shrugging off a commitment to meet with a group of familiar faces, it involves making a value judgment to reject the Lord himself.
So what happens when the Lord takes it personally?
The Lord will respond to each case as he sees fit. But we do know what the previous three texts say about his response in those situations. The Lord told Saul that it is "hard to kick against the goads." In other words, Saul was hurting himself by persecuting those individuals who had committed themselves to follow Christ. In the case of those who had refused to help others in need, they were sent off into the eternal fire with Satan and his angels. Matthew 25:41, 46 Similarly, we are warned that those who choose to fall away from Christ and therefore have mocked the grace which saved them face the vengeance of God. Hebrews 10:30-31 What does it mean to encounter the vengeance of God? This person's fate is described as facing the frightening prospect of being guilty under a judgment involving a fierce fire which will consume the Lord's enemies. Hebrews 10:27
What can we learn from all of this?
If it is my goal to have God's Word shape my life and thus I do not want to offend Christ, what principles can I draw from these texts to mold my thinking and actions? These texts would seem to suggest that:
• I need to treat others as well as fellow disciples as though each one were Christ. Would I dare refuse assistance to Jesus just because he looked like a social outcast? Would I dare criticize Jesus for being "holier than thou" because he wanted to be more involved at church than I am willing to be? Would I slander Christ because someone shared with me some gossip which they claimed was true about him? Would I deride his preaching because his lessons brought the Word of God too close to where it hurts in my life? Of course we all would say, "no, not me." Then we must also treat his saints as well as our other fellow human beings in the same way.
• I need to regard the assembling of the saints as being more than just a group of flawed individuals getting together; rather it is Christ's personal invitation to come to honor Him. If Christ were to personally invite any Christian to an assembling of the saints, I doubt that any disciple would say to their Lord who endured the agony of dying on a cross, "Sorry, I'm too tired to accept your invitation to worship" or "I really would rather be _______." I even doubt that any follower of Christ would turn down a personal invitation from Jesus to join him in praise, prayer and the study of God's Word if that invitation was for a Sunday or Wednesday evening and those who were leading the service were perceived by human standards to be mediocre in ability. Would anyone dare say to Jesus, "I would rather not go because I don't like the songs we will be singing" or "Sorry, I am only required to worship once a week?" Would anyone dream of saying, "I don't like the style of the one presenting your message?"
Why is it then that these same Christians might very well choose to do something truly mundane when they could be gathering to worship the Father and His Son? I suspect it is because that after years of worshiping with the same old group of familiar (and flawed) faces to do the same old stuff, someone can be tempted to view worship with self-centered and secular eyes instead of with Other-centered and spiritual eyes. If that person evaluates worship based upon "how much I am going to get out of it" instead of its true purpose, "how much can I genuinely give from my heart to honor God," then his or her estimation of the assembly can quickly degenerate into evaluating it as something mundane and even criticizable.
There is the need to deliberately maintain the biblical
focus that worship is a time when we gather together as the body of Christ
to express to God and Christ our gratitude with reverence and awe. Although
Hebrews 10 addresses the person who is leaving Christ, it reminds us that
the assembly is more than just another group of people getting together
to do the same old stuff. It is a time when the saints gather to honor
Christ and each one of us will want to accept that personal invitation
from Christ. Hebrews 10:29
Barry Newton, Copyright © 1999
Other articles which might be of interest:
Meeting Jesus Across the Fence
A Strong Temptation for Christians
(I'm
better than other people)
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