The following was written for the Your Jesus is Too Safe blog tour. Thanks to Jared C. Wilson and Kregel Publications for a copy of the book to review.
It seems fairly evident that the Christian faith is about Jesus. But that this is obvious doesn’t mean it’s not neglected or distorted. We are prone to place all sorts of other priorities above getting to know our Savior. As bad, we have a bent toward remaking him in our image. As Michael Card wrote, “We’ve made you in our image, so our faith’s idolatry.”
Two books in the past have helped me get a better handle on how we read our culture into God, instead of bring God to our culture: Donald McCullough’s The Trivialization of God, and Erwin Lutzer’s Ten Lies About God. Jared C. Wilson’s book, Your Jesus is Too Safe, is a welcome addition to volumes that set our thinking straight about our faith, and it’s focused on Jesus.
Wilson’s book gives us an overarching biblical view of Jesus. But it’s not dry, stuffy theology. It’s very much alive both with adoration for Christ and with connecting points to our culture through Wilson’s use of pop culture phrases and concepts to communicate his message. If you’re wondering how to be “relevant” about Jesus without compromising the message, this is how you do it. It’s evident that Wilson doesn’t believe he needs to make Jesus relevant, but that He already is.
And that is the greatest value of this book: It sets our thinking right about Jesus in an age in which he’s been fit into every other mold we can think of, and there can be nothing more “relevant” to our culture than presenting the “not safe but good” Jesus. If Christians get Jesus wrong, we get everything else wrong. Every generation of Christians needs to know and love Jesus, and every generation has its own challenges and obstacles to doing that. Wilson’s book faces these obstacles head-on with chapter after chapter of lucid writing about Christ.
The book lends itself very well to use in Sunday School classes or smaller group studies, and I can’t recommend it highly enough both for personal and group study. It’s the kind of edifying book about Christ that we all need.
There is one, and only one complaint I have about the book, and it is very serious: In a footnote on page 51, he insults Alf. That is almost unforgivable.
Apart from that heresy, you need to read this book.