Get Right Get Left or Get Going

This is the best I could come up with to explain this statement:

There is no conservative or liberal Jesus, there is only Jesus.
__________________________________________
Everyone believes that they are right, or at least deep down they must hope that they are.

This often seems especially true of those who too freely proclaim their certainties of God,  His views, and just what it is He requires.

Often this will be the motivating factor in qualifying to their mind many reprehensible actions and reactions they might not otherwise feel compelled towards.

I am surely no exception.

I find it however quite disturbing when over the course of time I come to see that this God so many speak of with so great of certainty, seems to look remarkably like them.

Perhaps their confidence and certainties in speaking about who God is (or is not) then is based in personal experience.

More disturbing to me though is the further realization that God, their God, looks so very different from mine.

For I am quite certain that in actuality God looks and thinks remarkably like me, and as I change, so does He.

I have to believe however in considering all of this that we are merely the finite in quest of understanding the infinite.

It is a quest that we must admit and accept, will not come to resolve in this lifetime.

It is a process and in that process we tend to attribute the views and values gleaned from these very limited experiences and understandings as those of God's, for that is how we have come to know and relate to him.

We mistake the many steps in the process as each being the end of the process.

For this we should ask and extend forgiveness.

At the end of it all though, it is my sincere hope that we find He is very much unlike us, any of us.

That being the author of them, His views are not limited by time and experience as outs are.

So that He is able and willing to give us that which we actually need over that which we desire, or believe we need.

For which of us, if we are capable of being honest with ourselves, could measure up to the rigid standards that we, without thought or regard for the experience of others, seem so free about applying to them, as though our understanding and experiences should be theirs a well.

It is as though we seek a mutual understanding only on the term that it is our own understanding.

This will never do, for just as our lives are very different, we will certainly then each have our own callings and convictions which will manifest themselves differently in each of those lives.

We will each then have to account for our actions or lack there of in following them.

That we apply "liberal" and "conservative" to both politics and Christ mostly seems to confuse the nature of both, and serves more to divide than unite.

We err in judgement to take the view that the cause of Christ is served through politics.

If any actions that might seem parallel to the heart off Christ is found in any political party, or politically based actions, it is purely incidental because politicians (and consequently then politics) are rarely if ever concerned with His cause.

Even if at the outset a politician has the best of intentions toward serving Christ's cause, the success of one area will generally come at the expense of the other.

I have to believe that reasoning, in part, might be why Jesus himself might have been so stringent in specifically not taking up the kingly (political) Messiah as the Jewish people had anticipated and longed for and why He very carefully avoided the pitfalls in addressing inquiries of that nature.

Politics was the path to the cross.

Let's then not look to our own standards, but make Christ our standard, so that we can move beyond applying the labels of conservative and liberal and address what matters in the way that it matters.

If we are then to be liberal or conservative, let us pray that it is the very manner which Christ himself exemplified, without reducing His agendas to ours.

Liberal in grace and mercy. Liberal in compassion and forgiveness.

Conservative in judgment regarding matters we have no business judging for we cannot know the heart of another or the path God had planned for them even if we find that we are in many ways remarkably similar.

We are all remarkably similar, in one way, we are all sinners, some perhaps less offensive to our senses than others, but all of us offensive beyond hope without Christ himself intervening to do for us that which we could never do for ourselves.

If we reduce the compassion of Jesus for the reconciliation of men's souls to mere politics or religion, we will not achieve the whole of his purpose and we will have accomplished nothing.

In doing so I think we will find that at the heart of the matter there is a good deal of heart in very little that matters.