04/18/2026
“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 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 religious-industrial complex around him, complete with a profitable marketing strategy. But the Jesus we have, the Jesus of modern Western Christianity, is neither 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 spots 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. Eager to serve and save. 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 nights. But here’s the problem: That Jesus, the one we’ve made in our own image, would be unrecognizable to the people who followed him in the first century. They didn’t have a personal life coach. They had a King who demanded absolute allegiance.
They didn’t have a personal life coach. They had a King who demanded absolute 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 execute his mission—and, in some cases, be executed for the mission.”
Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore, The Missing Messiah
