The Personal Jesus

Since the Christian life involves an ongoing transformation of becoming more like Jesus, we need to know what Jesus is actually like. Today, Sinclair Ferguson expresses the importance of knowing our Lord personally and deeply.

Welcome to this new week on Things Unseen. If you’ve just recently discovered our weekday podcast community, you’re very welcome indeed to join us. We never actually meet in person, as far as we know, but I hope we all feel part of a little worldwide community, and we’re glad you’ve joined us.

The longer I’ve gone on in the Christian life, the question that has become more and more important to me is this: What was and is Jesus really like? Perhaps you know the pop song “Personal Jesus,” which was written and recorded by the band Depeche Mode, I think sometime in the late 1980s. I first heard it in the Johnny Cash version, and maybe Johnny Cash thought the song had a Christian meaning—the way people speak of Jesus as their personal Savior. But I think it’s actually about how one other person can be a Jesus-like figure to another, someone to hear your prayers and to be there for you. That’s who your own personal Jesus is, not actually the Jesus of the Christian faith.

Yet over the years, I’ve come to notice that sometimes Christians do make up their own personal Jesus. They’ll say things like, “The way I like to think about Jesus is,” and I hope when they say that, they maybe start later on to realize that’s a muddle-headed way of thinking about the Lord Jesus. How I like to think about Jesus is irrelevant. What’s important and relevant is what Jesus is actually like. Or to put that differently: I’m not the one who decides what Jesus is like. He is the One who decides what Jesus is like. He doesn’t fit into the way I like to think about Him. I need to learn to fit into the way He really is.

And of course, the place to go and find out who He really is and what He’s really like is the Bible, isn’t it, and especially the New Testament, and most especially the Gospels. It’s by saturating ourselves in what we read in the Gospels, and living with that, that we get to know who He really is and what He’s really like. And since the Christian life involves our progressive transformation to be more and more like Jesus, it’s important—no, it’s actually essential—that we do know what He is like.

There’s another reason for asking this question. It’s that I think a fairly definite trend has appeared in evangelical preaching over the past fifty years or so. I would say until that time, our preachers preached Christ and Christ crucified, like C.H. Spurgeon did. And no matter where they began their sermons, they would get to Christ. And they did that because their hearts and souls and minds were centered on the person of the Lord Jesus. By and large, they didn’t do it by any particular formula. They did it because they were Christ-full. And as a result, they not only communicated the truth about Christ, but they communicated all the affections that Christ has for His people.

Sometimes today, I feel as though I’m standing on the banks of the River Jordan, listening to John the Baptist saying, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” but not actually being helped to behold Him as the loving Savior He is, as the personal Jesus.

One of my friends, who was a professor of psychiatry—not theology—once described this to me as “substitutionary atonement lite.” In other words, the message about Jesus is, “He died for our sins,” but it’s abstracted from Jesus’ incarnate person in our flesh and blood. But actually, it’s that Jesus that my heart is hungry for—the Jesus who was kind to sinners, who touched lepers, who cared for lonely people, who was tired and hungry and thirsty, who was demeaned and shamed. It’s the affectionate Jesus I want to know, not just “substitutionary atonement lite,” for all the heart of the gospel is substitutionary atonement. I want to know the Jesus who loved me and gave Himself for me, to borrow Paul’s language. I want to know that personal Jesus.

And that’s where the challenge lies for all of us, isn’t it? It’s easier to think of a formulaic Jesus, to use words like atonement and justification and reconciliation to describe what He does—and they are hugely important—but we mustn’t abstract them from Jesus Christ Himself. As Paul says, Christ Himself is our peace. He is our righteousness. He is our sanctification. He is our redemption. And you know what the challenge is about presenting the personal Jesus? We can only do it well when we know Him well and love Him well, too. Remember how the author of Hebrews puts it? He says, “Fix your eyes on Jesus.” We’ll need to think more about this tomorrow, so I hope you’ll join us on Things Unseen. And in the meantime, may we all grow a little more in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Himself today.