This excerpt is taken from an interview a friend of mine and I were reading the other day… I found his comments pretty neat…as well as I like his perspective on things, particularly this:

You talk in the book about the ‘big Jesus.’ Tell me about the big Jesus that you know abd how that differs from ‘small’ or ‘smaller Jesus’ or even ‘eentsy, beentsy, microscopic, teeny, weeny, little Jesus’ out there.

For many people the message of Jesus was presented as an individual message of salvation for their own individual sin: “Jesus died for you.” I affirm that wholeheartedly, but in the scriptures, its scope goes in the opposite direction. It begins with the Jesus who dies on the cross and rises from the dead. But as the New Testament progresses, you have writers saying that “by his shed blood he is reconciling everything in heaven and on earth.” Peter says in Acts, “He will return to restore everything.”

So it is a giant thing that God is doing here and not just the forgiveness of individuals. It is the reconciliation of all things. It is the putting back together of the whole universe how God originally intended it to be. One way to look at it is that the message is an invitation into God’s giant, global universal purposes that “I” actually get to be a part of.

I’m trying to get the focus where the first Christians seem to have had the focus. It is easy for it to become a very selfish thing-“look what I’ve got”-as opposed to “by the grace of God look at this amazing thing that he’s been inviting people into for thousands of years.” And that is quite an awe-inspiring, amazing thing.