I once pried the Jesus fish off the back of my car. At the time I was still learning how one could be a Christian and a Chicago driver at the same time. I often found myself aggressive when I should have backed off, yelling when I should have kept my mouth shut, and cutting people off rather than letting people in. The changes I needed to make seemed insurmountable and were going to take some serious time and effort and so I pried the fish off so that I wouldn’t lead people to think that God is an angry, graceless, speeding, jerk.
Those of us who call ourselves Christian, whether we like it or not, serve as advertisements for Christianity. Just as we judge a political party by its representatives, a craftsmen by the things they make, and parents by the kind of children they raise, people judge Jesus by his followers. I’m not sure who let the people around us in on the secret but, it’s as if the culture around us knows that we are supposed to be pointing people to God. It’s as if they are trying to hold us accountable to the fact that the scriptures tell us that God is making his appeal through us. The difficult part is that we can’t just pry the fish off our backsides rather, we have to work on our representation and persistently apologize when our driving stinks.
As we begin this new semester together I invite you to consider where your representation of God is accurate and where it needs a little driver’s education. Don’t be too discouraged. The Scriptures promise us that true change is possible even for the most committed Chicago drivers, for if anyone is in Christ they can be a new creation, the old goes away and the new comes in its place. So as we begin our travels together this semester I pray that we will each reach a place where we can dig the Jesus fish out of the junk drawer and glue it back onto our vehicles. I pray that we would be accurate representations of a God who is slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who is so gracious that he can’t wait to forget our past mistakes, a God who doesn’t rush past people but comes and shares a meal with them, and a God who is never a jerk.
