The Wild Jesus

The nature of true love is commitment. We don’t need to be perfect before we can commit our lives fully to Jesus or live sinlessly after we have committed our lives to Him. And we will struggle to give some things over to God’s control. But Making Jesus the ruler of everything does mean that ----to the utmost of my ability and knowledge ----we surrender total control of our lives and beliefs to Him.

To ask God to be in control of my life does not mean life will lose its edge. Jesus is not predictable or tame. To echo C. S. Lewis’s famous thought in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, He is not a domesticated house cat but a wild lion. He was a threat to the religious establishment of His day—as He will still be today. To quote Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost, Jesus was baptized by a wild man. He inaugurated his ministry by spending time with the wild beasts of the wilderness. He was unfazed by a wild storm. There was an untamed wild power within him. If our answer to the question “What, would Jesus do?” is that he would be conventional, safe, respectable and refined, then we suspect you didn’t find that answer in the Gospels.

To be taken captive by the “wildness” of Jesus implies that life will be out of my control, but not out of His control. Every area of my life will be both surrendered to Him and radically reshaped by Him. Everything will be seen in a different light, changing the way I see life, church, God, politics, mission, and the world I live in.

Excerpt from the book "Follow: A Simple and Profound Call to live like Jesus" by Floyd McClung.