Forget Everything You Thought You Knew

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has found the trailers for the Paralympic games on Channel 4 really inspiring over the last few days.

 

Images of people who have overcome huge adversity and have shown tremendous resilience and perseverance to compete in the games.

 

The 'tag lines' have really made me think too:

 

Forget everything you thought you knew about strength.

 

Forget everything you thought you knew about humans.

 

The suggestion is that, as the games unfold over the next 10 days, our thoughts about what strength really is and what it is possible for a human to achieve will be completely challenged and transformed.  Any preconceived ideas we may have had about what can be achieved will be blown away.

 

It's easy to form opinions and preconceptions and we all do it all of the time - we base our understanding of the world on our own ideas and our past experiences and our understanding of the world.

 

Even if sometimes we're wrong.

 

And we do it with God too.

 

I heard someone say recently about Jesus - Most people think Jesus was a nice guy in a nightie, walking around in sandals politely asking people if they wouldn't mind behaving a little bit better.

 

But that's not the Jesus we find in the Bible.

 

Jesus was passionate and compassionate.  He was giving and forgiving.  He reached out to the outsiders of society, the ones that no one else would touch or acknowledge and He healed them - both physically and emotionally.  He gave hope to the hopeless, direction to the lost, and significance to the meaningless.  Ultimately, He gave Himself for us*:

 

"He set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human.  It was an incredibly humbling process.  He didn't claim special privileges.  Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion."

[Philippians 2:6-8 MSG] 

 

What if the stereotypical image we have of Jesus, or His dad (old bloke, long beard, white nightie) is wrong?

 

What if we need to redefine and rethink our thinking?  What if we cast aside our preconceptions and our prejudices and discovered what Jesus is really like?  What if we collapsed the walls of our thinking and took God out of the boxes we have created in our own minds?

 

What might happen?

 

Forget everything you thought you knew about God.

 

 

* And all without mention of a nightie.