Loving Jesus: push coming to shove

Well, as life has seemed like a nightmare these past 22 years and as I push further into faith, it dawns on me more and more that I love Jesus very much. I don't want to give up on what he said about faith. I trust what he said about the powers he has given us over sin, sickness, death, and the demonic. There is no turning back for me now. It's kind of an all-or-nothing situation. To not believe in his words of the full gospel and to accept a kind of lukewarm gospel which means I believe in salvation but all else must be cured by doctors and we must live in poverty and if we don't have money to go to the doctor well, it's all God's sovereign will or God is too above that....well, I just can't. It's full gospel or none at all.

So that left me pondering last night what I think of Jesus: I know he is Lord but now I have to push forward into believing He is God-in-the-person-of-the-son. I love him for his human greatness. I think I'm in love with him as a good person and as a bit of a holy revolutionary. I believe He's the son of God. And yet..I love him more for his humanity as Son of Man than I really think about his divinity as Son of God.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Jesus is not the son of God. I'm saying I love his humanity very much. And when I love him it's in his humanity that I love him. I know that the Lord gave him and only him the full measure of his holy spirit so that Jesus's walk through life was pretty much God's walk through life because Jesus had the fullness. I believe he was the lamb slain from the foundation of the earth and that he made some pre-New Testament appearances -- such as Melchizedek, the angel of the Lord, the fourth man in the fire, the Lord who came down from heaven and talked with Abraham before the journey to check out Sodom.

I just have to love him as much as God as I do as Man. I tend to reserve my love for God for the Father alone. But More and more it dawns on me that I have to love Jesus as God, love Father as God and love Holy Spirit as God. A lot of Christians tend not to see Holy Spirit as a person and often attribute what he does to Jesus -- they say "Jesus come into my heart" but really it's Holy Spirit we should be asking to come inside our hearts. And many of them don't really think of Holy Spirit as a friend; instead they think of Jesus as a friend. Or the Father as a Father. But my situation seems to be that I connect to Jesus more as Son of Man -- a man of sorrows, a dying sacrifice, etc-- than I think of Him as Son of God. Must work this out.