I love my Jesus, mostly becasue he's mine.

I have been thinking a lot lately of the concept of Jesus as "personal savior."

I grew up in a context where a personal relationship with Jesus Christ was the primary focus of all evangelism and discipleship efforts. When we wanted to ask someone if they followed Jesus, we asked them if they had a "personal relationship" with him. This is the way we figured out whether or not they were going to hell.

I have difficulty with this approach to the "divine relationship" because it takes a very complex thing (human relationships) with transcendent implications (the God of the universe is involved) and makes it a simple binary mechanism. Do you or do you not have a personal relationship with Jesus?

What if you do one day, but don't the next? I mean, this seems to be the way most human relationships work, they are constantly in process, in a sate of flux. Sometimes they are good sometimes they are bad. They are very meaningful some days, and almost meaningless other days. Relationship undulations are a normal part of the human condition.

And then theres the reality that Jesus was/is much more than my personal savior. We forget that the biblical Jesus was a prophet, priest, king, rabbi, radical, Jew, and human. He is the Savior of the cosmos, the Redeemer of all that is. This is a magnificent reality that is almost ignored in our obsession with our own personal Jesus (queue the Depeche Mode riff). We have taken the Creator-God, the Redeemer of the Universe, and made him our "Buddy Christ."

Yay for us.