Do You Know Who He Is?
How this song came to be.

One day while working at Copper Rock Coffee, a customer and I began talking about Jesus. I remember that the man asked me, “If God claims to be all love, why would He choose to come to this earth as a white male? We all know that white men have dominated cultures for centuries, and that the effects have been negative each time. So why would Jesus choose to portray Himself as a power hungry individual, if His purpose was to communicate love?” This man obviously was a thinker who may have not really researched who Jesus was and is.

I told him that he should continue to seek the truth; that as he looked into Who Jesus really was, he would find Jesus to be quite unlike the perceptions that most people carried of Him.

Jesus crossed culturally acceptable behaviors, not caring about high reputation, just to communicate love. He loved the people whom no one else thought twice about; the Samaritan woman at the well, the tax collectors, the prostitute, the children…

That day, I left the coffee shop saddened that this man had never heard about the love of Jesus in our Christianized, western society. Within weeks of that conversation I began to notice why this man may have never seen or heard of Jesus in the way that I know Him. I noticed that we, the church, people who claim to know and follow Jesus, barely know Him ourselves. We walk around with a lack of honesty that is sickening. We are nice to people because it’s our “mission” and yet inside, we are mostly dying because we don’t know this God Who has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and Who has called us into His glorious light.

I so easily slip into a comfortable ignorance, comparing what I know to what others know; forgetting that Christ is so much more than I can begin to fathom. Jesus claimed to be God and in truth is God. Because of this I should never stop growing in knowing Him and accepting His love for the world and me.

Copyright © 2005 Katie Nelson.