Back to Basics: What is Christianity All About?

Modern Christianity has become cluttered with political affiliations, moral checklists, and cultural baggage that often obscure the simple truth of who Jesus really is. Christianity at its core isn't about systems or structures—it's about a relationship with the Jesus we encounter in the Gospels. Jesus is the Word made flesh, the perfect image of God who came to set people free and make broken people whole. Following Jesus means centering what He centered, loving who He loved, and allowing Him to reshape our worldview rather than fitting Him into our existing beliefs.

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Transcript

All right, church, if you have your Bibles, I'm going to invite you to open up to the Book of John. We're going to start at the beginning of John in chapter one, verses one through 18. You should be relatively familiar with this scripture, but we're going to read it again. Here's the word of the Lord for us this morning. If you don't have your Bibles, you can follow along on the screen.

Here's what it says. In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He.

He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life. And that life was the light of all mankind.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe he himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

He was in the world. And though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive Him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God. Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testified concerning Him. He cried out, saying, this is the one I spoke about when I said, he who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me. Out of his fullness, we have all received grace in place of grace already given.

For the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Friends, we live in a world filled with noise. Wouldn't you agree? I think today everyone, more than ever in history, has a platform. Everybody has a message. Everyone has a quote, unquote hot take, right?

And if you've ever spent more than five minutes on Facebook or Instagram, you know that everyone also, I think, at least in part, believes that they are a theologian. But somewhere, somewhere in the middle of all this noise, I feel that Christianity has gotten, let's just say Cluttered. For some, Christianity has become a political identity, meaning that faith can only be Christian if you align with one political party or the other. For us in America today, it's almost as if we've forgotten that Christianity isn't an American invention. It actually started in the ancient near east more than 2,000 years ago.

But here we are in the some. Sometime back in the late 20th century, American Christians came to the conclusion that that the US Is like the base of Jesus ministry. For some people, Christianity has become a moral checklist, ascribing to very specific moral stances. It may mean that for any particular person to be considered a Christian, that person must agree with me on issues like abortion or immigration or military policy, or how much national debt we're going to have, or health care or free school lunches or any other controversial issue that might arise. The most extreme version of this type of Christian thought looks like only the people who agree with me are even Christian at all.

Everyone else is wrong in their faith, and they're not Christian. They're something else. They're less than for others. Christianity has become nothing more than a distant childhood memory, maybe a part of somebody's past. Maybe Christianity is something that they gave up on a long time ago.

Sure, they might have been baptized Christian, but they no longer go to church anywhere. Christianity for them is no longer something they agree with. Maybe they see the headlines in the newspapers or on the evening news, or maybe they see the big news stories that break over social media. They see the corruption among popular televangelists. They see the arrests of pastors for inappropriate actions.

And they've decided that any faith that looks like that, it looks like those people is not something that I want to be a part of.

For others, faith just becomes a set of doctrines, things that you're supposed to nod along with. Maybe a recitation here or there of the Apostles Creed or saying again the Lord's Prayer, and then our faith becomes affirmed. Some people may go to church on Sunday mornings, but their faith is an active Every day that they live, they don't live their life in a way that represents Jesus. They don't live out aspects of their life like volunteering or calling out injustice as our baptism vows require us to. Sometimes people, they're just incapable of loving their neighbors.

So this morning, as a response to the way that Christianity looks in our country today, I think it's important that we get started kind of going back to the way things used to be. I want us to start this process of stripping away some of the noise, the clutter, the assumptions, the cultural baggage that make Christianity something different than it's ever meant to be. I want us to get back to what our Christian faith is supposed to be about, because Christianity as its core or at its core is not. It's not about a system, really. It's not about a structure or a formula.

It's not about any particular denomination being better than any other. It's not about a political party or any specific individual social issues. Christianity is not about a moral checklist of rights and wrongs, things to do or not to do.

Christianity isn't supposed to begin with a rule book. It's supposed to begin for us with a relationship. And that relationship is supposed to be with the Jesus of the Gospels, not some idealized version of what Jesus is, something that makes us feel comfortable with the way that the world looks right now. But in order for us to fully know Jesus, we have to know more about the world that Jesus was born into. I think we have to be aware that, you know, Jesus was born as a Jew to observant Jewish parents who followed Jewish law and tradition.

We have to remember that there was no Bible, there were no churches. There wasn't communion or baptism in the same way that we know it. And we're going to talk more about those things as we continue on throughout the series. But for today, I want for us to start with what it means to separate our Christianity from some of the things that Christianity has become. I want us to be able to focus on our faith despite the noise of the world around us that tries to distract us.

Speaking of noise that distracts, just this week, we needed to buy a new vacuum cleaner for our house. I don't know exactly how our vacuum cleaner got destroyed. All I know is that I came home and found my vacuum cleaner in pieces in the garage. And we didn't need anything fancy, right? We don't need the most expensive vacuum cleaner in the world.

We just need something that can pick up the crumbs without sounding like a jet engine turning on or something that would burst into flame because of the amount of dog hair that we have in our house. And so my wife found one that she liked. Nicole found one that was apparently pretty well reviewed, and I got the job of putting it together so that we could vacuum before a small group on Thursday night. Thank you. You're welcome.

So I thought, hey, no big deal. It's just a vacuum. But to be safe, I'll go ahead and check out some YouTube videos on how other people liked this particular vacuum or what it takes to put it together. Famous last words. Suddenly I'm 45 minutes deep into the Internet reading a 2000 word dissertation written by somebody who apparently has a PhD in vacuum sciences.

One review says from one person, this vacuum changed everything about my life. It's so fantastic. Another one says, this vacuum ruined my marriage. So I've got to figure out somewhere in the midst of the noise it could be true. I've got to figure out some way to reconcile these things.

Right? Someone else is posting pictures of dust bunny the sizes of small dogs and write manifestos about dirt in their home. At this point, there's a group of one star reviews that talked about blustery the noise is that it makes, or how heavy it is, or oversized. There's another group of opposite opinions. There's five star reviews talking about how this is the Lord's chosen vacuum and it's able to clean the whole house without even breaking a sweat.

There are just so many different opinions. Meanwhile, in the midst of my deep dive into YouTube, I am nowhere near closer to putting this thing together. And I'm thinking to myself, if I don't get started working on this thing, there is no way we're going to get our floor vacuumed before people start showing up. By the end of my research, I wasn't any closer to figuring out how this vacuum cleaner got put together. Instead, I was questioning everything about my whole life.

Right? Do I even deserve clean floors? Should I be using a broom instead of this vacuum? Is dust a spiritual metaphor for my life right now? Right.

I started with a simple need and ended up drowning in the noise of opinion and debate. And that's exactly what happens with our faith sometimes. We were all starting with Jesus. Every one of us, I think, came to faith because of a response to the person that we read about in the Gospels, this Jesus. Simple, clear, beautiful.

And then we get to pile on opinions on top of Jesus and then arguments and then debates and hot takes and theological yelp reviews about churches and denominations until we're more confused about who Jesus is than we were when we started.

Let's be honest, Christianity has picked up a lot of cultural clutter over those centuries, don't you think? What are some of the things that you notice about the church that are different now than maybe even when you were a child? Or maybe better yet, can you spot some differences between the modern church and the way the church looked in the first century?

Hallelujah for air conditioning, right? Yeah. Women no longer have to cover their Heads in church. What are some other things that we notice?

You remember wearing three piece suits to church, right?

Martyrdom and persecution also. Okay, so some things have gotten a little better. All right, thanks, Jeff. You probably would have learned that at Methodism 101 last week. Okay.

You would. Okay, great.

Women can lead in the church, friends. The United Methodist Church has been ordaining women since the 50s, so hallelujah for that. There's a lot of. How many of you are wearing shorts today? Good, because it was like 18 degrees when I got here this morning, so you shouldn't be wearing shorts.

But listen, I don't mind seeing your knees, friends. That came out really weird. I recognize that. Not. Not really what I meant.

But the situation is we don't have like a formal code on what it looks like for us to have to show up to church. You might have noticed in churches there are sometimes flags of different sites. Right? Sometimes churches have a pledge of allegiance either to the American flag or the Christian flag, or both. Sometimes churches play secular songs as intro music.

You ever seen lights and fog machines in churches before? Right.

I don't want this to feel like it's an indictment on the modern church. It's just a reality that the church has become cluttered with things that didn't really have a place in the church before. The church has also suffered with things that aren't just theological issues, but also practical issues as well. Do you guys remember the worship wars of the 1990s? I almost said 1900s, right then, just to be like some of the young.

You remember Back in the 1900s, Matt, what was life like? Shut up.

So in the 1990s, if you remember anything about the worship wars, it was a time in the church's history when the traditional church and the contemporary church fought over what style of music was most appropriate to glorify God with. That in itself, friends, is a dumb debate, right? As long as we're worshiping God, it shouldn't be a fight over which one is better or more acceptable. The battle of the time was war over whether the church was going to continue to sing the hymns of the church, the ancient church hymns that we all grew up with and knew and recognized, or to start singing these things, newfangled worship songs called praise choruses.

No, stop. You're jumping ahead.

Some of you are too smart for your own good. No, I'm just kidding. Don't, don't. No one's ever too smart for their own good. The debate was traditional, contemporary.

Are we going to do something in between something in the middle. There were fights over whether or not churches were going to put up video screens or only allow hymnals in the sanctuary. Right. It was a tense time to try to introduce anything new, musically at least, into church because everything during the 1990s became a worship fight. I've been leading in churches since the 1990s.

I was a teenager in the 1990s, one of the best times to be alive. And even in our youth group, I was leading worship. I was a part of these worship wars as a youth in our church because our youth was kind of pushing the edge of what Methodist worship looked like. When I got called by God into ministry as a teenager, that call came during one of those emotional, kind of contemporary, youth focused worship times. And from that moment on, contemporary worship, which now has kind of evolved into what we know as modern worship, appealed to me deeply and it hit me spiritually.

It connects me deeply to my call and to my faith. But I don't think it has to be an either or. I served for a pastor who said, matt, you could do either or, but somebody's going to be hurt. The best move is always a both. And.

And he said, when we started changing the worship of our church, we didn't just say only screens or only hymnals. We allowed for both.

Just like I don't reject the singing of hymns because I love contemporary music as well, I have a tremendous love for the hymns of our faith that helped shape me as a young person. And these worship wars in the 90s were crazy. And this shift between American music types in part came as a result of cultural shifts in our country. And these battles weren't just new in the 1990s. People apparently have been fighting over what worship is supposed to look like since the beginning of the church.

As a matter of fact, Methodism's founder, John Wesley, had a very typically Wesleyan dry opinion when he was asked about his thoughts about worship music in the church. Not just about worship music, but specifically instrumental worship music back in the 1700s. I'm going to read this quote to you. Here's what it says. Oh, wait, there we go.

John Wesley says, I have no objection to instruments of music in our worship, provided they are neither seen nor heard.

Right. This is John Wesley saying, great, you can have as many musical instruments as you want. As long as they're put in a box and shoved under your pew, there is no reason for you to be playing them. Right? This is the founder of the Methodist Church, and here we are with, like banjos and spoons.

And other things in our. No, no tambourines ever.

There's another leader of faith that also has a great quote. The organ in worship is the insignia of baal. The Roman Catholics borrowed it from the Jews. That's awful, right? That.

That is Martin Luther, right? The founder of the Lutheran tradition.

Sorry. Hey, I didn't say it. He said it. I'm just telling you what he said. All right?

Some of the things that we've incorporated into our worship are beautiful and meaningful. We've got incredible traditions and hymns and liturgies that speak to us and draw us close to God. But some of the things that we've incorporated into worship are harmful, judgment, exclusion, fear, things that don't look like Jesus at all. And we also have the in between. Some of it is neither harmful nor beneficial.

Some of it is just noise. And in the midst of the noise, sometimes we can't experience the God who loves us.

And this happens to our individual faith, too, sometimes. All of us, I think, started with Jesus. Simple, clear, perfect. And we pile on our own opinions, our arguments, debates. We hear other people's hot takes.

It influences us. We have our own interpretations until our faith looks vastly different from the Jesus of the gospel. Today, as disciples of Jesus, we are supposed to be focused on our relationship with him, what he taught us, how he interacts with others, what love truly looks like in our relationship with God incarnate, what it means for us to be servant leaders. Right? All of this is dependent on Jesus.

But instead, for many of us, and it may not just be us here in this room, but when I speak about the church, I'm talking about the American church at large. Some of us become mouthpieces for the opinions of authors of books that we've read that we like. Some of us become mouthpieces for podcast. You know what? Hosts.

That's the word, podcast hosts that we listen to, we turn the Son of God into a topic that can be interpreted based on our denominations or our political affiliations or our own limited understanding what Scripture is telling us. We prove that for some people, God's Word is not enough. Which is ironic because we literally just read in the Book of John that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was. I'm sorry, I heard one person say that the Word was.

There's a Greek word I want you folks to learn today. It's a word, logos. Everybody say logos. It's a word that is used here to describe the word, right? And if you notice, it is a Capitalized L because it becomes almost like a name for Jesus.

It doesn't. It's not a word that just means the word. It means reason and logic and meaning. It means God's divine expression.

It means the organizing principle of our entire universe. God's word, the Logos is bigger than just letters that form a word. John is saying here that Jesus is the meaning behind everything. From the beginning, the word was with God. The Word was God.

Another Greek word I'd like for us to talk about this morning is the word eskynosin. And this is a word in Greek that when we read it, it's a word that means a phrase. It means dwelt among us. It's interpreted as dwelt among us. It literally interpreted means something like Jesus pitched his tent with us.

You ever pitched a tent before for some of us? It's easy pitching a tent for some of us. Like my buddy who I do man ventures with. It's pretty awful and there's a lot of foul language involved. But Jesus intentionally left his kingship in heaven to set up his tent to dwell among us.

There's a word in the Old Testament called tabernacle. Do you know this word? Tabernacle is actually the place where God spiritually meets with his people. It becomes for us a verb here in this tense when we're talking about eskinosin. Jesus tabernacled with us.

The message version of the Bible puts it like this. Jesus moved in the neighborhood, right?

This is similar to the idea within the Old Testament where God dwelt in God's house. The tabernacle, which later became the temple, God's dwelling place, was specific and it was intentionally sacred or set apart from the sinful people that worshiped him. In Jesus, God breaks down those walls of the tabernacle and God shows up to live with us.

Nothing can now separate us from the love of God. God didn't stay distant. God moved in next door. The Word was with God. The Word was with was God.

John tells us that the Word was made flesh. We're going to read a little bit more this morning. That not only point to God's unwillingness to stay distant from God's people, but we're also going to see how Jesus becomes the clearest and most perfect revelation of God for us. We get an opportunity through God's Word to hear God's mission to save us from our sin. So I want us to turn to the book of Colossians.

It's in the New Testament, Colossians, Chapter 1. Is the very first chapter. We're going to read verses 15 through 20. And as we look at this, I want us to think about the beauty and simplicity of what it means for us for God to move into the neighborhood. It's a simple statement, right?

He pitched his tent next to ours. He made God knowable. God became tangible for us. But somewhere between Christ's birth in Bethlehem and today, we've managed to clutter up what it looks like to be with God. Some Christians treat Christianity, their faith, like a gym membership.

You sign up with big intentions, you go a couple of times, and then life gets busy, right? But you keep the key tag on your gym bag because it feels good to look at it every once in a while, right? Even if you've not stepped inside for months. A lot of people approach their faith in the same way. They like the idea of being a follower of Christ, but the actual practice of showing up, of being stretched, of growing, of learning about Jesus, that part becomes optional.

And that's not the way it should be. And to go further, some churches put in place so many dadgum rules that even Jesus would need a visitor's badge.

We've taken something simple and beautiful, embodied, like God choosing to dwell among us, and we've buried it under layers of expectations, opinions, and a lot of spiritual fine print that makes no sense. This is why we've got to keep coming back to the simple truth. If you want to know what God is like, then we have to look to Jesus. Jesus is God's clearest, simplest, and most uncluttered expression of God's own heart. So let's read this Colossians passage together today.

It says this in verse 15. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, Whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. All things have been created through him, and for him he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church, and he's the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all his faithfulness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. In other words, if your God doesn't look like Jesus, your God, friends, is too small.

Colossians tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The word here used in The Greek is the word icon. It's spelled a little weird, but the word here is icon. I think you all know what an icon is, right?

An icon that we're talking about here is not just a reflection, but the exact imprint. God's visible likeness or God's embodied representation is the icon that we see in Jesus. Jesus is, for us the physical manifestation of God's perfect invisibility.

Jesus isn't like God. Jesus is God revealed. There's a word for that. What is it, Levi?

What is the word for Jesus being God? Homoousios.

In Greek philosophy and Jewish thought, an icon wasn't just a picture. It was the tangible, concrete expression of something you otherwise might not be able to physically see. So when Paul calls Jesus the icon of the invisible God, he's saying, if you want to know what the invisible God is like, look at Jesus, because Jesus is God made visible.

This isn't a metaphor. This is ontology. This is the expression of the very being of God.

There's another Greek word here in Colossians that I'd like to highlight. The word is synestecan. The end of verse 17 would have sounded something like this. Panta and auto sinistecan. You get that?

Yeah. Okay. This is a phrase that, when it's translated, means all things in him hold together. Panta and auto. Synestecan.

Synestecan means to sustain. Do you hear that? In the echoes of the Greek word synestecan, sustain. It means to keep things from falling apart, to be in union together with.

What Scripture is saying here is that Jesus is, in part, the sustainer of all things. All things are bound to one another in perfect order through the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the glue of our universe.

You might not have caught this. When the apostle Paul says that in Jesus all things are synestecken, he is saying that in him all things are now being held together. He's using the perfect tense. Not just created and left, not just launched, but held by Jesus, sustained by Jesus, kept actively currently from falling apart. It's a perfect tense, meaning that Jesus didn't just do it then.

Once upon a time, Jesus is holding things together for us. Right now, 2,000 years on, Jesus is still doing the same thing. Every breath, every heartbeat, every single atom, every story, every moment held in the hands of our Christ.

Which means that when our faith feels cluttered, when life feels scattered, when we feel like everything is being pulled apart at the seams, Jesus isn't just the center, he's the one holding everything together. For us, we don't have to rely on our faith. Jesus is doing it for us. We don't have to rely on what we think we know. We don't have to rely on the traditions.

All we have to do is rely on the Jesus of the Gospels to hold us together.

When we look at Jesus, we see a God who heals, right? I think we can all agree on that. When we think about the stories of Jesus, a lot of the stories we think of are the times where he heals the sick or he cures the blind or he raises people from dead. Our God is a healer. If we look at Jesus, in Jesus, we see a God who forgives.

We see a God who welcomes, a God who confronts injustice, a God who lifts up those who are lowly, a God who breaks bread with sinners, a God who refuses to shame those who are broken. A God who chooses compassion over condemnation every single time. We see a God of mercy instead of a God of retribution. That is the God that we say that we worship. That's the God that we follow.

This is a God who calls every one of us by name. That's the God who desires that we pattern our own lives after Jesus of the Gospel. But in the midst of the noise of our world, I struggle to see Jesus. And in many of us, I think our world has misunderstood for some time who the true Jesus of the Gospel is. And we're trying to make Jesus into something that he's not.

Sometimes we think we understand what's happening, but we're off. And if we can misread something as simple as a moment in church, imagine how easy it is to misread Jesus when we've piled on layers of expectations, layers of assumptions and noise.

Before we end this morning, I want us to look at one more scripture. It comes to us from the Book of Luke, chapter 4, verses 16 through 21. It says this. He. It's Jesus went to Nazareth where he had been brought up.

And on the Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read. And the scroll the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written, the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue fastened on him.

He began by saying to them, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

Could you imagine Jesus standing up and reading this scroll? The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. That is some dramatic language. But Jesus is saying, in this moment, you've seen that it's being fulfilled right now.

This, friends, is Jesus mission statement. This is Jesus. Why, this is his purpose. And he boldly declares it in the synagogue in front of people that Jesus knows would accuse him in that moment of blasphemy.

But there was nothing going to stop him from proclaiming that boldly. There's a Greek word here in Luke 4:18. It's called Ephesus. When he says, he has sent me to proclaim Ephesus for the prisoners, Jesus is talking more about more than just about freedom. Jesus is speaking about deliverance.

He's talking about forgiveness. In the Greek concordance, it's actually a word that is used in place of the word remission, much like a person healing from cancer would be in remission. Jesus is expressing Ephesus for the prisoners. This word has a deep meaning, and when we read it in English, it doesn't quite strike as hard as it should. It means to let go, to liberate, to unchain.

It literally means to give somebody freedom. It's reprieve, it's pardon. And we know what a pardon can look like. If somebody is on their death sentence. If they're sitting in the electric chair and they get a phone call from the God that says, you know what?

Pardoned, let him go. That's a big deal.

Jesus here in this moment is being very deliberate. He's declaring that his mission is freedom, both spiritually, socially, emotionally, economically. Jesus has come so that we can be forgiven from our sin. And notice that Jesus doesn't say in this moment. He doesn't say, I have come to make people behave.

He doesn't say, I have come to create a very, you know, very specific voting block. Right? He doesn't say, I've come to build a religious empire. And he certainly doesn't say, I've come to protect the status quo. In his mission statement of Jesus, he says, I have come to set people free.

I've come to heal. I've come to restore I've come to give hope church. Jesus didn't make bad people good. Jesus didn't come to make bad people good. Jesus came to make broken people whole.

If Jesus had a LinkedIn profile, his job description would be liberator, healer, table flipper. Right? Like Jesus was pretty radical.

So, church, as we get ready to leave this morning, I hope that each of you have had an opportunity to hear something that truly shows you who Jesus is. And in case you missed it, I'm going to recap it real quick for you. Following Jesus means that we begin to center what Jesus centered. We begin to love what and who Jesus loved. We begin to prioritize the same thing that Jesus prioritized.

We care about who and what Jesus cared about.

It means we've got to stop trying to fit Jesus into our own worldview and instead let Jesus reshape our worldview.

It means we've got to stop asking, in what way does Jesus support my agenda, my ideas, my preconceived notions? Or how does Jesus confirm the way that I'm living right now? Instead, we have to start asking, how can my life better reflect the kingdom that Jesus came to establish, a kingdom of justice and righteousness? We've got to start asking, how can I become the best possible representation of Christ in every way that I live my life? Means we've got to start.

We've got to stop treating Christianity like a brand.

And we've got to start. We've got to start treating it like a calling on our lives. It means we've got to stop pledging allegiance to those who quote Christ but refuse to live like Him. It means we stop worshiping Jesus with our lips while ignoring his call to do kingdom work with our lives. And traditionally, United Methodist Church has understood Christ's mission pretty darn well.

Our Methodist history has reflected Jesus in the way that Methodists throughout time have fought against slavery, how we've empowered women, we fought for equality. We've sought out justice in the face of danger or conflict. The way of Jesus, friends, is not a suggestion. The way of Jesus, for us as his church, is a must. John Wesley understood this deeply.

For Wesley, Christianity was never just about belief. It was about transformation. Right? He talked about proving grace, God seeking to be active in our lives before we even recognize that God exists. John Wesley also spoke about justifying grace, how God, once we recognize him, begins to reshape us and restores us.

And he also talks about the sanctifying grace that God offers us as we become more like Christ in our journey with him. Wesley didn't want people to simply say, I believe in Jesus. He wanted people to become like Jesus. He didn't want a church full of spectators. He wanted a church full of disciples.

And that's what I want for us, too. He didn't want a faith that was stuck here in the pews. He wanted a faith that spilled into the streets.

And I believe that's the kind of message that Jesus would align with. So here's the questions I want to leave you with today. What would our lives look like if we truly centered our lives on Jesus? Not just the Jesus we've created, the white American Jesus, but the Jesus of the Gospels? What would our church look like if we centered that Christ?

What would our relationships look like? What would our priorities look like? But most importantly, if we look like Jesus, what would our communities look like? Because when we put Jesus at the center, fear loses its grip and shame loses its power. Division loses its appeal and hatred loses its voice.

When we seek to once again put Jesus as the center of our faith and not our politics or some fake American values centered on some strange version of Christianity. We become people of grace, not people of judgment. We become, as we should, a people of compassion, not condemnation. A people of courage, not complacency. A people of deep love and not fear.

So this we can always church. We are called to be transformed and to be transformative. Maybe this week we start learning more about Jesus by reading one gospel, maybe one story, maybe one chapter or three verses, whatever it is. But find a way to get deeper involved in the life of Jesus. So there's no question about the Jesus that we serve.

As we move throughout this sermon series, I invite you to seek to let Jesus reintroduce himself to you. Let Jesus reshape your imagination. Church. We've got to once again put Jesus at the center of our faith. May it be so.

Let's pray.