I argued against preaching a “life-improvement Jesus” earlier this week. Now here’s an excerpt from Michael Reeves’s book Rejoicing in Christ (as posted in Christianity Today) explaining what happens when the real Jesus is preached:
Life, righteousness, holiness, and redemption are found in Jesus, and found by those—and only those!—who look to him. Perhaps I should be clearer: It is not that we look, get some sense of what Christ is like, and then go away and strain to make ourselves similar; we become like him through the very looking. The very sight of him is a transforming thing. For now, contemplating him by faith, we begin to be transformed into his likeness (2 Cor. 3:18), but so potent is his glory that when we clap our eyes upon him physically at his second coming, then “when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
That full, unveiled, physical sight of the glorified Jesus will be so majestically effacing it will transform our very bodies around us. The sight of him now by the Spirit makes us more like him spiritually; the sight of him, then, face to face, will finally make us—body and soul—as he is....
The light of his perfection exposes our imperfection more than any wielding of the law ever could. It makes us see ourselves aright. As John Calvin put it, “man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face.” But it does more than expose: it overcomes our imperfection and so liberates us. And it cures us far more effectively than any effort at self-improvement....
[I]t is the very grace of God, appearing from heaven in Christ, that turns hearts from worldly passions to godly passions. Where self-dependent efforts at self-improvement must leave us self-obsessed and therefore fundamentally unloving, the kindness of God in Christ attracts our hearts away from ourselves and to him. Only the love of Christ has the power to uncoil a human heart.
Read the rest of the excerpt in Christianity Today, or get the book.