When you think of Jesus, what picture comes to your mind?  Around Christmastime, you may see Him as a baby lying in a manger.  If it’s Easter season, you will probably picture Him suffering on a cross.  But what about the rest of the year?

              When you think of Jesus, you might picture Him as a serious Bible scholar refuting the religious hypocrites of the day.  Or it could be a portrait of Him blessing the children who were drawn to Him because of His obvious interest in them. 

              When you think of Jesus, you may see Him touching an unclean man with leprosy and forever taking away his dreaded disease.  Or you might picture Him making mud with His saliva and rubbing it on a blind man’s eyes that are about to see for the first time!

              When you think of Jesus, you may see Him feeding a multitude of many thousands with nothing more than a few pieces of bread and a couple of small fish.  Or you could picture Him calming a storm, walking on water, and even allowing Peter to do the same!

              When you think of Jesus, you may see Him cursing a fig tree, or cleansing the temple of its corruption.  Or you might see Him calling up to a short tax collector who has climbed a sycamore tree just to get a glimpse of Him.

              When you think of Jesus, you might picture Him healing Peter’s mother-in-law, paying his taxes or washing his feet.  Or you could see Him forgiving the sin of a woman caught in adultery, or replacing the ear of an enemy servant that a zealous disciple had foolishly cut off.

              When you think of Jesus, you could see Him casting out demons and sending them to the abyss.  Or you might picture Him bringing a widow’s dead son, or a ruler’s dead daughter, or a beloved dead friend back to life!  

              When you think of Jesus, all these pictures of Him have worth.  However, these pictures are black and white and not color; they are poorly focused and not sharp; they are low resolution and not high definition.  The best pictures of Jesus are the ones that predate, or follow His extremely short stay here on earth! 

              We do ourselves a significant disservice when we allow our portrait of Jesus to be framed by His brief earthly pilgrimage.  Those pictures are outdated.  Yes, He was God then, but His glory was mostly invisible to the masses.  They saw His humanity but were generally blind to His divinity.  I fear we see Jesus the same way; to our own undoing.

              Have you seen word pictures of Jesus as He is today?  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a focused, high definition, color picture of Jesus, in all of His present majesty and glory, is worth at least a million!  More appropriately, an accurate picture of Jesus is worth our life, our all and our best!