Holy Boldness

background of everything He did. The first line of the “Lord’s Prayer”, “Our Father, which is in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” (Matthew 6:9) is a cry for the fear of the Lord. This is exactly what we would expect because the Messianic prophesies that Jesus fulfilled describe the coming Messiah as someone immersed in the fear of the Lord. But this aspect of Jesus’ humanity is rarely emphasized in most Christian circles. Lack of emphasis on Jesus’ humanity is a major deficiency in much of the church’s teaching. Jesus not only came to die for the sins of humanity but He also came to restore mankind’s mandate to represent God in the earth. Mankind was created to bear the image of God, to be His representative in the earth, to govern the earth as His royal ambassadors and to steward the earth’s resources until the entire planet was fully subdued and infused with God’s glory. 1 But that extraordinary mandate was forfeited in the garden through Adam and Eve’s rebellion and disobedience. Jesus came not only to forgive mankind’s sins but to restore the original mandate by restoring the original image of God in man. Jesus became the way back to the Father and incidentally the way back into sonship as heirs of the Kingdom. Tragically, that divine purpose ceased to be an emphasis in much of the church. Within the first hundred years, the church’s focus shifted from making disciples who lived and thought like Jesus to arguing over the deity of Christ and other doctrines of orthodoxy. The heresy of Gnosticism distracted the church and became a major battleground. As the church gained political power it lost the moral high ground, and used doctrinal conformity to evaluate its membership. The church made believing the right doctrines the test of orthodoxy rather than conformity to the image of Christ. Meanwhile, the emphasis upon actually pursuing and doing the will of God was set aside. 2 In the first 400 years of Christianity, there was a great controversy The Lost emphasis of Jesus’ humanity

1 See Genesis 1: 26, 27 and Numbers 14:21 2 For a detailed history of the loss of the church’s focus on the Gospel see The Torch of ine Testimony , John W. Kennedy, Seedsewers Publishing

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