I’m reading a book by Daniel Montgomery and Mike Cosper called, “Faith Mapping,” and on page 162 they share an insight from Dallas Willard …and I think we need to absorb it and ask God to Author and Perfect it in the body of ECPC.
In our culture, and among Christians as well, Jesus Christ is automatically disassociated from brilliance or intellectual capacity. Not one in a thousand will spontaneously think of him in conjunction with words such as “well-informed,” or “brilliant,” or “smart.”
Far too often he is regarded as hardly conscious. He is taken as a mere icon, a wraith-like semblance of a man living on the margins of the “real life” where you and I must dwell. He is perhaps fit for the role of sacrificial lamb or alienated social critic, but little more. But can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed? Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what Christians take him to be in other respects and not be the best informed and most intelligent person of all: the smartest person who ever lived, bringing us the best information on the most important subjects.
What lies at the heart of the astonishing disregard of Jesus found in the moment-to-moment existence of multitudes of professing Christians is a simple lack of respect for him. He is not seriously taken to be a person of great ability. But what then can devotion or worship mean, if simple respect is not included in it.
In contrast, the early Christians, who took the power of God’s life in Jesus to all quarters of the earth, thought Jesus as one “in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). They thought of him as master of every domain of life.”
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