On Sunday we looked at the rainbow of reactions the crowds in Jerusalem had to Christ after His teaching during the Feast of Booths. The responses ranged from acceptance to cynical mockery. They revealed a truth about human nature, a truth that reminds us of how a prism works. When a prism is struck by white light, refraction causes that light to travel through the prism at different rates. The variation in speed results in light being fanned out into its various colors by the time it exits the glass. In much the same way, the same Jesus who reveals Himself to all men is refracted through human nature and that revelation ends up distorted and colored by the journey.

As Christians, we are prone to the same phenomenon. Even as the children of God, our personalities, experiences, biases, and relationships can distort and diminish the radiance of Christ’s revelation of Himself to us. How do minimize this effect so that we can behold, worship, and obey Jesus as He demands and deserves? I think a helpful defense against distortion is to think of our relationship to Jesus as the alignment of four things: Christ, our mind, Scripture, and our experiences/feelings/biases/etc. – what we’ll call our expressions.

Imagine Christ as a beam of light. How should the other parts be aligned so that the beam of light is successfully and accurately transmitted from one end of our collection to the other? There are a number of permutations we could test, but I want to explore only two. I believe these two are the most common and the most important to discuss.

Option A: Christ – Expressions – Mind – Scripture

This alignment is what happens when our pursuit of Christ is controlled by our feelings. We believe we are close to Christ when our experiences are positive, and far from Christ when our experiences are negative. We seek for emotional highs, a sense of radical passion. Another approach is to perceive Jesus as someone who fits with what we believe a Savior should look like (usually something in current cultural fads and values). This means we have placed the prism of our personality directly in the path of the light of Christ’s revelation so that by the time it strikes our mind, we have already distorted who Jesus is and conformed Him to whatever shade we like best. If your favorite color is blue, then you end up convinced in your mind that you have a blue Jesus. When, or if, we open our Bibles, we are happy to find that every page is washed in that same lovely shade of blue. We project what we have already determined onto the pages of Scripture. Such a person may reach heaven if they have trusted in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, but they will discover on that day just how little of Jesus they beheld in life, and how compromised their obedience, evangelism, and worship were. They will also tragically discover that a blue Christian tends to reproduce spiritually by creating other blue Christians. Their loss becomes the loss of others. But there is another way.

Option B: Christ – Scripture – Mind – Expressions

This alignment is the alternative that Christ would have us employ. It is the alignment that acknowledges that Christ’s revelation of Himself is contained in the Scriptures. It is the words of God that give to us an unblemished look at the glory of Christ. Unlike our expressive personalities, which function like a prism, the Word of God functions like a lens. It focuses, intensifies, and transmits the light of Christ accurately and powerfully. To this lens, we must align our minds. When we meditate on the Word of God, that Word, like a two-edged sword, goes to work shaping our thoughts and revealing our flaws. It is not always an emotionally exhilarating experience, but it is a divinely appointed and glorious process we are commanded to engage in. The final result is that the light of Christ works its way, by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the lens of Scripture, through the mind of the believer, and then is projected through our expressive personality. And this is where something truly beautiful is seen. We are able to express, in the unique way that each believer has been singularly created by God to do, the true light of Christ. Beams of white light - some wavering, some short, some intense, some broad – sweep out around us and onto the world.

Then we watch. As that light hits a world full of prisms, we see a shattering of colors. Here, and there, the color begins to change, to thin, to combine. What was a streak of red or a stab of green brightens and coalesces into a beam of white. This is how the church grows: Christ – by the power of the Holy Spirit, through the revelation contained in Scripture, as understood by the mind of believers, and expressed in our unique personalities – conforming prismatic sinners into beacons of truth.

If trying to draw near to Christ through your emotions and expectations has got you feeling blue, then pick up your Bible and ask your Savior to directly illuminate your mind.