3 Questions About Jesus: Ben Sternke
This week Ben Sternke responds to our 3 Questions About Jesus: Who is Jesus the Christ? What has he done? And why does it matter? (Previous installments: Jason Coker | Jesse Schroeder | Cari Jenkins | Jason Clark)
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Who is Jesus Christ? Wow, where to start. Jesus is a lot of things. First, I should say he was a man who caused quite a stir around 2,000 years ago by claiming that the God who created the entire cosmos was working through his life to save the world from itself, to make everything right.
Which sounds incredibly cliché, doesn’t it? It’s easy to find nutcases like that today. The thing about Jesus, though, was that he backed up his claims by making things right with unusual power and effectiveness: delivering people from sickness and psychological oppression, bringing freedom from guilt and shame, challenging injustice, and teaching people how to live well.
Ultimately this put him on a collision course with the religious and political authorities of his day, because they had stock in keeping people fearful and needy. But instead of fighting them, Jesus allowed them to torture and kill him. Even those closest to him didn’t understand this. Why not fight to stay alive? They thought it was over after that.
Hang with me, because here’s where the story gets crazy. He didn’t stay dead. A few days later he was alive again, in a totally new way, like he’d gone through death and out the other side. He had actually conquered death by his own death and through his resurrection opened the door for everyone to enter into a truly blessed life in God’s family.
We enter into that life by becoming an apprentice of Jesus. It might sound kooky, but you can actually know Jesus today. You can really be with him and he will teach you how to live a blessed life in God’s family, just like him.
Pretty unlikely story, huh? Yet I find myself living in it every day.
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Ben Sternke is a husband of one, a father of four, and currently pastors Christ Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a recent missional church plant. He also blogs about faith and church leadership at bensternke.com.
This is truly the response most churches seem to shy away from these days. It’s simple, looks foolish on the surface, and it is what has been changing people’s lives for 2000 years. My one remark would be over personal sin. Not only did people one day put Christ on that Cross, I did. My sin, my own contribution to the worlds wrongs, put him on there. He died to actually forgive that. If I didn’t have that, I’d be completely lost.