I live in a community where a minimum of at least three languages are spoken fluently, and regularly. So on any given day, you might hear a conversation and have no idea what is being said.
I think people sometimes feel this way about Christianity. Like, they hear us but don’t understand. And I think this can be just as true inside the church as outside. Religion can confuse people. And what I mean by “religion” is a mix of the old and new covenant— a sort of hybrid (but not biblical) concoction of Christian lingo.
No wonder the opening verses of Hebrews went straight to the point and addressed this very subject:
“God, who at various times and in various ways spoken in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son…” (Hebrews 1:1-2). Let’s read this again in a slightly different translation: “Throughout our history God has spoken to our ancestors by his prophets in many different ways. The revelation he gave them was only a fragment at a time, building one truth upon another. But to us living in these last days, God now speaks to us openly in the language of a Son…” (TPT).
Jesus is the language of God.
When I caught this, I thought wow, that’s the fastest language course ever! What I mean is, you want to understand God? You want to understand His heart and mind? Open your heart to Jesus, then get to know Him (study, gaze, reflect on Him). That’s it.
The Old Testament has wonderful prophecies of our coming King. And the adoration they held of God is inspiring and truly relatable to those whose hearts have been touched by His love. But to really be transformed by the renewing of your mind and know the perfect will of God, get to know Jesus.
“For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded…” according to Romans 8:6, learn the language of God— Jesus.
The writer of Hebrews described Jesus as the express image, or mirror, of God Himself. And I think this is how (hopefully unintentionally) the “religious language of God” became so contorted. People read about God in the Old Testament and forgot to filter everything through the finished work of Christ Jesus NOW. In other words, they looked in the wrong mirror.
As the Bible says, God wasn’t being unjust when “…He held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past, for He was looking ahead and including them in what He would do in this present time. God did this to demonstrate His righteousness, for He Himself is fair and just, and He makes sinners right in His sight when they believe in Jesus” (Romans 3:25-26 NLT).
God is Love.
To learn the language of love, you simply have to get to know Jesus. God speaks in “Son” — in other words, the Sonship of Jesus is the language He now uses to speak to us. Before Jesus came to set things right, the language of God was works. But even that was a “tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith” (Galatians 3:24).
Jesus is the language of God and heaven and I want to learn how to speak (and live) it fluently. As we learn the language, we’ll be able to gracefully and effortlessly reach both the insiders and the outsiders. The insiders are those who already have Jesus in their hearts and hunger to know Him more. The outsiders are simply those who have have heard the knock of Jesus at the door of their heart, but have yet to respond.
Either way, it’s a universal language— one we should all speak fluently.
