Who is Jesus to Us?

            This past week in our class we did an activity, which involved writing down on a piece of paper real quickly who Jesus was to us. This was meant to show us how all of us have a different perspective on parts of Jesus person. Typically this has to do with our own personalities and things that we seem as important traits and characteristics of a human being. After seeing how different the two other guys in my group’s responses were I thought to myself this would definitely affect the way I preach from now on in my life. Just because I see Jesus, as having certain traits that stand out does not mean the person right next to me see those as standing out. This is very good knowledge to know and not a bad thing whatsoever. This will help me to do a better job of describing different aspects of Jesus to different people. Everyone in a different circumstance and problem looks to Christ for an answer that may not necessarily be what I need.

            We watched a video that Philip Yancey put out that is called the Jesus I Never Knew. This video is based on a book that he wrote and it talks about the ways that we see Jesus. Media has done a big job in shaping our view of the man who walked this earth over 2000 years ago. Along with artwork that has been painted over the centuries we developed a bit of a western view of who Christ was and what he looked like. This short clip showed different movies that portrayed Jesus in different ways to demonstrate how people might view him n a certain way because of what they saw in a movie. It was an interesting display of how different our views of Christ could be because of movies and such. This needs to be taken into account when we teach about Jesus because we can become stuck on a certain view. The activity and video did very much to help me see this and be very careful not to only show Jesus the way I see him but to look beyond my worldview and look to what others may see.

Certain stereotypes of Jesus need to be broken because of what people have seen and deemed to be who Christ was. I hope to be able to do that through correct teaching. This class we just had helped me to see this.