The Little Church on the Prairie started a new sermon series this past Sunday based on Philip Yancey's book, Jesus I Never Knew.
Many church going people are often surprised once they start encountering the Jesus of the gospels because he is so much not like what we thought Jesus would be. The Jesus of the gospels is so much more radical, gracious, forgiving, threatening, demanding, loving, alive than we imagined.
But that's just it. One of the greatest task of modern day Christians is to unlearn what we think we know about Jesus so that we can encounter the Jesus of the gospels.
In the book, Jesus I Never Knew, Yancey quotes Malcolm Muggeridge in one of the most poignant critiques of our "humane" modern day society:
Malcolm Muggeridge observed that in our day, with family-planning clinics offering convenient ways to correct "mistakes" that might disgrace a family name, "It is, in point of fact, extremely improbable, under existing conditions, that Jesus would had been permitted to be born at all.
"Mary's pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for an abortion; and her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger.
"Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born."
(Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus: the Man Who Lives, p. 19).
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