When my son was in middle school, he came to me wanting a pair of Air Jordan 4s. Not just any shoes—he wanted the Jordan 4s. He’d been dropping hints, showing me pictures on his phone, and finally he just came out with it: “Dad, I really need these shoes.”
“Need?” I asked. “What do you need them for?”
“They’re just . . . they’re cool. Everyone’s wearing them. They’re classic.”
Classic. That word caught my attention. So I asked him, “Do you know why they’re classic?”
He shrugged. “They’re Jordans.”
“But do you know who Jordan is?”
“Yeah, Dad,” he said with that tone teenage sons reserve for fathers who ask obvious questions. “Michael Jordan. He was a basketball player.”
To my son, Michael Jordan was just a logo. A brand. A name on a shoe that happened to be trendy. He had no idea about the flu game. The shrug. The last shot against Utah. Six championships. The way Jordan didn’t just play basketball, he transformed it. He made everyone else look like they were standing still while he operated in a different dimension. My son didn’t understand that Michael Jordan wasn’t just a basketball player; he was the basketball player.
To my son, Jordan meant style. To me, Jordan meant transformation.
Same name. Same shoes. Completely different meaning.
We’ve done something similar with Jesus. He has become our logo, our Friend, a Savior and a confidant who approves of us, forgives us and encourages us. He is all those things, to be sure. But to reduce him to a brand borders on blasphemy.
Ask most people what Christ means, and they’ll probably tell you it’s Jesus’ last name. As if Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph Christ in Bethlehem, and eventually he started the religion that bears his family name. But Christ isn’t a last name; it’s a title that means “anointed one” in Greek or “Messiah” in Hebrew. Somewhere between the first century and today, we’ve forgotten what that title actually means.
When the first followers of Jesus called him Christ or Messiah, they were not giving him a surname; they were making an explosive political, theological and revolutionary claim. They were saying that this carpenter from Nazareth was the promised King Israel had been waiting for. The one who would establish God’s Kingdom. The one who would challenge every earthly power. The one who deserves total allegiance. If Christ is your Savior, then he serves you. If Messiah is your Lord, you serve him. Both are true. But one without the other leaves us with a self-serving ideology or an oppressive religious system.
In the first century, it was dangerous to call Jesus “the Christ.” It was the kind of thing that got you killed. People didn’t casually throw that title around. If you said someone was the Messiah, you were saying he was the rightful king, which meant Caesar wasn’t. You were saying his Kingdom was ultimate, which meant Rome’s wasn’t. You were pledging your allegiance to him above all other authorities.
That’s what Christ meant.
But somewhere between the first century and the twenty-first, we’ve lost that meaning. We’ve turned a transformative title into a comfortable logo. We’ve turned the cross into jewelry or a trendy tattoo. We’ve domesticated a revolutionary claim into a religious label. And in the process, to some degree, we have lost the Messiah himself.
Oh, we still have Jesus. We talk about him constantly. We sing songs about him. We wear his name on T-shirts and put it on coffee mugs. We’ve built an entire commercial complex around him, complete with a profitable marketing strategy. But the Jesus we have, the Jesus of modern Western Christianity, isn’t the Messiah the first Christians knew nor the one his enemies feared.
We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our individual needs, bless our lives and guarantee our spot in heaven. We’ve made him into a spiritual life coach, a divine therapist, a cosmic vending machine who dispenses blessings when we pray the right prayers and live relatively decent lives.
That Jesus is safe. Manageable. Polite. Convenient.
He validates our choices. He baptizes our politics. He asks very little of us beyond that we show up at church occasionally and are generally nice people. He fits comfortably into our lives without disrupting them too much. On Sunday mornings, we want just enough guilt to make us feel like we’ve been to church but not so much as to interfere with Saturday night.
But here’s the problem: That Jesus, the one we’ve made in our own image, would be largely unrecognizable to the people who actually followed Jesus in the first century.
They didn’t have a personal life coach. They had a King who demanded total allegiance.
They didn’t have a spiritual therapist. They had a Messiah who told them to take up a cross and follow him, even to death.
They didn’t have a divine assistant who existed to improve their lives. They had a revolutionary who promised to turn the world upside down and who expected them to help him do it.
Same name. Completely different person.
It’s like my son with the Jordan 4s. We’ve inherited the name. We’ve claimed the brand. We may have even made him a nostalgic hero. But somewhere along the way, we missed the story. We’ve lost what it really means to call Jesus “the Messiah.” We’ve lost the dangerous, demanding, glorious reality of who he is and what he came to do.
It’s time to recover that story.
It’s time to rediscover the Jesus the first Christians knew, not just as Christ but as the Messiah. It’s time to understand how Western culture has gradually reshaped Jesus into our image and recognize the difference between a personalized Savior and a revolutionary King. And it’s about time we see the true cost, as well as the true gain, when we stop treating Jesus like a spiritual accessory and start following him as the Messiah.
To be clear, this journey won’t be comfortable. But if you’re willing to ask hard questions, if you’re ready to discover that you might have been following a version of Jesus that is partial, shallow or accessorized—an image Jesus wouldn’t recognize in the mirror—if you’re open to the possibility that there’s a bigger, more dangerous, more majestic Messiah than the one you’ve inherited—then it’s time to start.
We didn’t lose Jesus because he went somewhere. We lost him because we stopped looking for him. We settled for a smaller story, a safer Savior, a more convenient Christ.
But he’s been there all along, waiting. Waiting for us to stop being satisfied with the logo and start seeking the legend. Waiting for us to trade in our hand-me-down understanding of who he is for the real thing.
Excerpted with permission from The Missing Messiah by Kyle Idleman and Mark E. Moore. Copyright 2026, Tyndale.
Comentarios