At the Table with JesusSample

Jesus Is Our Glorious Savior

In today’s culture, we mostly prefer antiheroes over saviors. We like protagonists who look and talk a little more like antagonists. When they run (or fly) into action, they carry some baggage with them. They make mistakes. They blur the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, functional and inspirational.

Maybe that’s why so many people have trouble believing the reality of who Jesus is and everything He accomplished, because Jesus is nothing like Walter White (Breaking Bad) or the Merc with a Mouth (Deadpool). Jesus is a Savior to the core.

I love the way Jesus’ character shines through in His encounter with the Samaritan woman. If you’ve heard that story before, you might remember that the Samaritans and Jews were mortal enemies. Think of the ethnic conflicts raging today—Israelis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shias. That’s how much the Jews disliked the Samaritans. And the feeling was pretty much mutual.

Yet, while Jesus and His disciples were traveling, He decided to make a pit stop in a town called Sychar in Samaria. And when a woman from that town approached the well where Jesus was sitting, He did not ignore her, as was the custom of the day. Instead, He initiated a conversation. Why? Because there at the well, Jesus understood this woman was drowning— not in water, but in sin. She was drowning in the consequences of poor options and poor choices.

Jesus reached out to save this woman not because it was convenient for Him, and not because He wanted to expand His brand into the Samaritan community. No, He reached out simply because He is a Savior. He is the Savior. Reaching out to those in need is central to His nature and character. In fact, reaching out to those in need was (and is) the centerpiece of His mission and purpose. It’s what He lives for.

The people of Jesus’ day carried a desire deep within their hearts. That desire was based on a promise God had made many times throughout the Scriptures—what we know as the Old Testament. Specifically, God had promised that someone would come to make the world right once more. Someone would come to fix what had been broken and restore what had been lost. In other words, someone would come as Savior.

For centuries, God’s people had waited for that promise to come true. They had waited for Messiah to enter the world and accomplish His extraordinary work. Can you imagine, then, what it must have been like for that Samaritan woman—that regular, unheralded, underappreciated woman at the well—to sit in front of Jesus and hear Him say, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he”?

To her credit, she knew the truth right away. She believed. What about you? Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not important enough. Don’t let any enemy hiss their lies about who you are—the wrong color, the wrong age, the wrong neighborhood, the wrong whatever. Jesus is Messiah, and He says you matter. He is the Christ, and He set a place at the table of your mind as the fulfillment of the greatest promise ever made.

Jesus is Messiah, the Christ; He is the Savior of the world sent to rescue people like you and me. But that raises a big question: Save us from what? Rescue us from what? What is the problem Jesus came to solve on our behalf?

The big answer is sin.

I know—that’s not a popular word. Those three little letters feel too churchy. Too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. But the reality is we’ll never have a proper understanding of Jesus until we come to grips with sin. More to the point, we’ll never have a proper understanding of Jesus until we come to grips with our own sin. Mine. Yours.

What is sin? There are lots of definitions out there. Missing the mark of God’s standard. Disobedience to God’s will. Rebellion against God.

The problem is sin doesn’t exist out there in the ether. It’s not floating around like a malignant virus trying to latch on and push us in the wrong direction. As Jesus said, our sin is “from within, out of a person’s heart.” That’s why we constantly struggle with immorality, greed, anger, deception, envy, malice, and so much more. The sinful things we do are based not on wrong choices we make in our minds but on who we are at the core. We are corrupted from the inside out.

We need to be rescued. We could no more solve the problem of our own sinfulness than a man suffering from cardiac disease can heal himself by ripping out his own heart. We need the spiritual equivalent of a heart transplant. We need to be transformed from the inside out.

In other words, we need salvation. We need the healing work of Jesus, the Christ, who is our Glorious Savior.

Respond

Do you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior?

Describe your salvation experience.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, thank You for providing eternal life, for saving us.