Beckoning people to follow the incarnate God in Jesus is drastically different than commanding people to be Bible-believing Christians. Jesus is the Word, God’s physical message, embodied for us to hear and see. He articulates and demonstrates the very heart of God. Jesus is God’s show and tell. You might think the difference between Jesus is the Word and being a Bible-believing Christian is an issue of semantics... it's not, it changes the way you see God, express God and live out God in the world. Whenever we talk about the Bible, Jesus-followers must remind ourselves that ultimately we are not people of a book, we are people of the Person. The book points us to the person of Jesus. If the values, opinions and postures we gathered up from the word in print don't point us to look and speak like Jesus, we got the Word wrong at some point in the process. As followers of the Word made flesh, we must resist succumbing to an approach to God’s Word that was as popular in Jesus’ day as it is today. An approach that would unwittingly rewrite the classic passage in 1 John to say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became print and page and dwelt among us, at least, among those of us who are literate and educated, and it rolled off our printing presses and was memorized and studied and debated and assembled neatly in doctrinal statements.”
Bruxy Cavey (The Meeting House) speaks like a classic Anabaptist and I love it.
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