Is Jesus Your "Homeboy"?

In the 90s, casual Christianity coined the phrase “Jesus is my homeboy.” I don't think those using this phrase meant any harm. They simply were trying to convey the idea that Jesus is not some transcendent God who is so far removed from His people that He cannot understand or relate to His creation. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit care about the intricate details of our lives, and want to have a relationship with us. He wants to be more than just our theocratic dictator God, He wants to be our friend. That's what I believe the “Jesus is my homeboy” camp were trying to convey.

However, there's a great danger in this phraseology!

The truth is, Jesus is nobody's homeboy. Jesus is the sovereign God of this universe.

The Bible tells us that all things were created for Him, by Him, through Him, and that without Him nothing that was made was made (Colossians 1). Jesus is God, and no less. As God He is holy. But what does it mean when we say that God is “holy”? I'm afraid that many people wrongly understand this term and believe that holiness primarily means that one is morally pure.

While holiness does, indirectly, carry the idea of moral purity, it means so much more than that. In the B-I-B-L-E the word “holiness” comes from the Hebrew “qadash” and the Greek “hagios,” and is the quality of being “set apart,” the idea that God is far different and separate from His creation in every way. 

God is holy because He is like no other!! His name and character are to be recognized by all as holy:

“For the High and Exalted One who lives forever, whose name is Holy says this: ‘I live in a high and holy place, and with the oppressed and lowly of spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the oppressed’” (Is 57:15).

Because God is holy, He is unsearchable and past finding out, inspiring awe and fear in us, not a mundane attitude that He is our “homeboy.” To see God as one’s “homeboy” is to be completely ignorant of His holiness, His separateness, and His moral perfection.

When we humans are confronted with God's holiness, our own unholiness is more clearly realized, as in the case of Isaiah (Is 6:1-7). He said “Woe is me!” and “I am undone!” God’s holiness reminds us of our sinfulness and humanness (just a John fell on his face as a dead man when he encountered Jesus in Revelation 1).

His holiness confronts our sinfulness and challenges us to be holy ourselves. God ordered the Israelites to set themselves apart from everything ritually or morally profane:

“I am the LORD your God, so you must consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am holy” (Lev 11:44).

As such, let us every day remember how holy and awesome God is. May we be so engulfed in the understanding of God’s holiness that we become compelled to become more holy ourselves. May we seek to be “set apart” for God’s special work, and thus become separate from the world and it's influences more each day.

Folks, we belong to God! We were bought with a high price - an unbelievably high price. As such, isn't it high time we started living in this light and stopped treating God in such a casual, flippant, “homeboy-ish” manner?? Isn't it time we started to respond to God’s holiness with holiness ourselves??

In Christ Alone,

Pastor Myke