Living a life of following Jesus is to live in a certain tension. Well, not just one, but one in particular I’d like to think about and talk about with you.

The core beliefs of someone (like me) who has chosen to accept Jesus’ invitation to “Follow Me*” must live within the tension of the life-altering truth of the gospel that is both familiar and yet foreign.

Familiar because we live and breathe this gospel truth every day. It permeates every part of our daily lives. There is nothing that is untouched by the transformational grace of God. Every thought, question, wrestle, word spoken, confrontation, conviction, relationship, concern, interaction, and every type of decision we make is changed dramatically in the light of Jesus’ love, life, death, and resurrection. It can’t be otherwise. For it not to be this way is to perpetuate what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace.” This is the catastrophic belief (whether conscious or subconscious) that God’s grace is readily available without requiring any effort or sacrifice from the believer.

And it is this true and real dynamic of faith that creates the connecting link between a familiar gospel and a foreign grace. Let’s now unwrap the foreign side.

Follower of Jesus, I’m addressing you and us together. We must not ever allow the familiar story of Jesus to become so familiar that we do not marvel at it endlessly. The gospel accounts recorded for us so beautifully, no matter how many verses our highlighters glide over, must never become bedtime stories that lull us to sleep. Rather, the life and love of Jesus is the awakening agent of who we are and all we are. The grace of God must always be an astounding and confounding truth that we simultaneously embrace and yet still struggle to embrace. It is in the wrestling that we find the fire. To become complacent in this is to set the gospel on a shelf in our minds and hearts, only to collect the dust of impotence and ineffectiveness. When we do this, our churches are filled with complacent critics rather than wonder-filled worshipers.

Many years ago, I read a book that I think I’ve mentioned on my website many times. It’s a book called “Dangerous Wonder” by Mike Yaconelli. I want to recommend it to you. And while you’re picking up that one, you may as well grab its follow-up, “Messy Spirituality.” These two books served as a tour-de-force in my spiritual life, inspiring me with a faith that is unfamiliar, scary, unpredictable, revolutionary, and was exactly what my heart needed to move from a performance-based religiosity to a grace-based love affair with Jesus.

Christians crack me up. At this writing, we are two days away from what we refer to as “Palm Sunday,” which ushers us into Holy Week: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy (Silent) Saturday, and, of course, Resurrection (Easter) Sunday. Of course, Easter is the biggest holiday on the Christian calendar (sorry, Christmas) due to the reality that we are celebrating the fact that Jesus rose again from the grave, conquering sin, hell, and death. And no, that’s no rumor or myth. Maybe you’ll consider the words of an Oxford professor:

“I have been used for many years to study the histories of other times, and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which God hath given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead.”

—Thomas Arnold, Professor of History Oxford

It is for me, and should be for you, that the resurrection of Jesus is validated and verified fact. If it is (and it is), what level of marvel and wonder do we meet it with? When we consider the cross, do we callously utter the words “Well, of course, He did. I knew He would” because we have the luxury of the full story? If the onlookers at the moment of Jesus’ death were able to form the words “Surely this was a man of God” (Matt. 27:54), can we assume to do no less two-thousand years later? Are we so familiar with the story that we no longer stand, mouth gaping, at the door of His vacant tomb?

What astounds me? What astounds you? I fear we may have lost the edge of our sense of wonder at the cross. I fear we may be taking the empty tomb more in stride with the spring-time season than a life-shattering, moment-by-moment, dead-in-your-tracks truth that keeps us living passionately pointing to that cross and that tomb. Lord Jesus, would you bring us back to your cross and your tomb and refill our minds and hearts and decisions with the kind of awe that is due such a beautiful and miraculous gift, bought for us by the shed blood of Jesus and the authority put on full display by a stone slap draped in empty grave cloth?

May we not treat this next week as an annual occurence, but as a daily celebration what cause our hearts to cry out in wonder, because we’re astounded at the depth of love God has shown us through Jesus.

*Jesus said, “Follow Me” in the following places through the four gospels: