Messiah

Yesterday, we said that if we're looking for a candidate, Jesus is Him. He's the one. Jesus is the person who can relate to what we're going through and who also has the expertise necessary to address the issues in our lives that are most concerning to us. 

But that doesn't mean that He campaigned for the job. 

This is something we have to be careful about when we draw connections between the things in our lives that make sense to us (like elections) and Jesus; we can't get the two of them tangled up. 

Jesus didn't come to campaign. He didn't come here to win your allegiance. He's not asking for your vote. God didn't send His one and only Son in the hopes that you might like Him better because He did. He didn't send Jesus to the Cross so that He might recruit you to His team. His end goal is not that you put a sign in your yard, wear the T-shirt, and maybe hang out at the polls and ask a couple of friends to vote for Him, too (even though we so often think that is exactly the goal of the Christian faith - and most of us have the T-shirts, bumper stickers, and yard signs to prove it). 

God sent Jesus into the world for one reason and one reason only: that He might reconcile you to Himself so that you don't have to spend eternity apart. So that you have a way back to the place that your heart still longs for, for the Eden that echoes in all of us. So that the very big distance between us and Him could be bridged by the outstretched arms of Christ, all the way from east to west. 

Jesus came to accomplish His purposes, not to campaign for ours. 

It just so happens, of course, that the real longing of our hearts is for His stuff anyway. So it's nice how that all worked out. 

The point is that we can't let ourselves think, even as we think of Jesus in the context of being the guy we would vote for if we were voting, that God came as one contender among many, as one option on the ballot, as one God in a race of many. Jesus is not some final nail in the coffin against Thor or Odin or Baal or Milcom or any of the other number of gods that peoples have worshiped over the years; He's not some campaign tactic so that you might write His name down somewhere. 

He is the reconciling, full-blooded body of God Himself, come in the flesh to deal a death blow to death itself with three nails - not in the coffin, but in the Cross. And that's not something we get to vote on. That just is what it is. 

And if you want to vote, if you really feel the need to vote, if this is the Guy you choose to give your voice to and want to even campaign for, then you vote with your life, not your T-shirt. You pick up a Cross, not a yard sign. You come to the table, not the ballot box. 

Yes, Jesus is the guy we would vote for; He's everything we're looking for. But this is no campaign; it's a covenant. 

It's not a promise; it's the promise.