Inferior Misgivings about Jesus

"I have no misgivings about Jesus, only about myself." I have said words very similar to these innumerable times. Oswald dismisses them as stemming from "pious fraud." Pious meaning religious, marked by reverence or false reverence, sanctimonious. Fraud meaning deliberate deception. And since I know I am not deceiving God, I can only be attempting to deceive myself.

I wrote those lines this morning and couldn't get any further, so I took a walk and had the clear sense that this is it -- the breaking point which I have been trying so hard to avoid.

Today's devotional is based on Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well in John 4. First, Jesus asks her for a drink. She replies with surprise that he, a Jew, would ask her, a despised Samaritan, for a drink. In verse 10, he says: "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." I imagine her trying to hold back laughter, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep."

If I knew who he was . . . The woman at the well could not know; she and Jesus had just met. I, however, am without excuse. This is only the fourth chapter of John, but already, the mounting evidence in this book alone is extraordinary. The Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove. He not only saw Nathanael sitting under a fig tree before they ever met, but he saw straight to Nathanael's soul: "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false." Likewise, he saw deep within Peter and gave him a new name, a new identity, "Rock." He changed water into wine. He made a whip of cords with which he drove long-established traders out of the temple and answered their angry demand for justification with this outlandish claim: "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." The next chapter contains an equally bizarre demand of one of the Jewish leaders: "You must be born again." This is who he is -- One who does not play by the old rules, One for whom there are no impossibilities, One who sees straight to my soul, One who makes outlandish claims and outlandish demands and has the power to bring them about.

What exactly is the basis for my doubts about his work in my life? Oswald is right: "My misgivings arise from the fact that I ransack my own person to find out how He will be able to do it." I limit him with my own limitations: "I have not believed in Thy wits apart from my own; I have not believed in Thine almighty power apart from my finite understanding of it."

Jesus, you see straight to my soul. You know me like you knew the woman at the well, know every thing I have ever done. You can change my very substance, destroy me and rebuild me, give me new life and a new name. My case is not too much for you. It is I who has nothing with which to draw.