MATT ARONEY

I spend a fair bit of time with young adults in the Inner West of Sydney. Our church in Newtown exists on the urban edge of the city. Newtown is widely known across Sydney for its alternative political, social and sexual views. It is a place where people come to learn a different way of life.

Often, I find that Christians who have grown up in other parts of the city really struggle when they move here. They begin to question the faith they had in their more suburban church upbringing. What kind of view of society do they need to have as a disciple of Jesus?

I think these questions are coupled with the fact that many young Christians seem to struggle with their faith in their thirties or even their late twenties. A lot of Christians in Sydney came to faith as teenagers. They learned to live a life of faith from their youth group leaders. What happens as they leave university and start in the workplace, is that their lives rapidly grow in complexity. For most of your faith in your twenties, you can live off the example of other Christians in front of you. But then, suddenly, life gets too complicated. The examples you have don’t match the life you’ve been given.

It’s kind of like those old films when projectors rolled long reels of film at the back of the cinema. At the end of the movie, the reel would end. There would be a distinct flick of the celluloid as there was nothing more to show. There would simply not be any more pictures. No Netflix™ suggestions of what to play next, nor a YouTube™ to autoplay a similar video. Just nothing.

Many young adult Christians have their reel run out. Life gets too big, and they don’t have the examples before them to know how to live effectively as disciples of Jesus. There is a whole host of issues involved in this moment and its problems. The most significant is about the Lord Jesus.

Often, what happens as life gets bigger, messier, more complex, is that our vision of Jesus remains small. We face the life of a thirty-something in an increasingly secular and complex world with the same vision of Jesus we had at sixteen or twenty or twenty-five.

What we see in 2 Corinthians is that the secret to transformation is growing a bigger vision of Jesus.

“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17–18).

The Holy Spirit is seeking to project an endless reel of the glory of Jesus onto our hearts so that we live for him in the increasing complexity and mess of life. We have the example we need, it’s just that sometimes we aren’t sure how to access what God has given us in Jesus.

The way we become more like Jesus is by apprehending more of his glory in the power of the Holy Spirit. The more we see of Jesus, the more we become like him. We need Jesus to grow in glory as the things of our life grow more dreadful.

Seeing Jesus

Back to these verses in 2 Corinthians again, and I promise we will go a bit further this time. We see, vitally, how the Spirit enables a spiritual sight for us.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17,18; emphasis added).

The interesting word used by Paul as he explains transformation is the word translated in NIV as contemplate, in the ESV it is to behold. Perhaps the best translation is in fact the old King James Version, which is “to behold as in a mirror.”

Notice how what the Holy Spirit enables for us is not just knowing about Jesus but beholding or seeing Jesus. It is the same word you would get for looking into a mirror in the morning as you shave or put on your make-up. It is the word for contemplating the hairs you want to remove from your eyebrows. When we look at ourselves in a mirror, we are indirectly looking at how we appear. Likewise, the Holy Spirit helps us indirectly see Jesus through his power, even when he is not present before us. As we see Jesus, we become like him. Notice how in Paul’s sentence the contemplating is the thing that happens as we are transformed. To become like Jesus, the only thing we need is to encounter him, to experience Jesus as he is.

How does the Holy Spirit help us see Jesus? How do we work with this and see more of Jesus? Paul goes on to explain this. Given that God is so wondrously at work in his ministry through the Spirit, there is one thing he simply does. He preaches the gospel. He speaks of not distorting the word of God, but instead setting forth the truth plainly. If anyone does not respond to the gospel, it is because they are blinded. Note the category of seeing. What don’t they see? The “light of the gospel” (v.4) in which we see the face of Christ. When the gospel is preached, somehow it imparts a light in which we see Jesus. So, Paul preaches Jesus as the Lord. Somehow, the Holy Spirit, when the gospel is preached, turns it into a light through which we see the glory and face of Jesus.

Often, this is most vividly experienced when someone first meets Jesus. My life in church began as a wingman of sorts. I ended up at a youth group through a friend who was more interested in one of the girls there than learning about Jesus. It soon occurred to one of the leaders that I really didn’t know anything about what was happening as we read the Bible together. At least that is my memory of it. Anton, one of the leaders, reached out to me, asking whether I was a Christian. I said I wasn’t sure. He then offered to read the Bible with me to work it out.

“Here is the simple truth at the heart of God’s work of renewal: Continual, deepening, remarkable encounters with the real Jesus Christ in the power of God’s Spirit.”

I had gone to a church school, heard sermons about Jesus, and read scripture in Christian studies classes, but when I started to read Scripture with Anton, it was like Jesus became a real presence. Jesus’ grace and mercy on the cross made him appear worthy of my trust and admiration. He captivated me. I think the way Anton mirrored the same love in the way he approached me had a lot to do with this. To see the same love embodied in someone right in front of me added to the sense of Christ’s presence. I had spent my young life driven by a fear of a God who seemed knowable. Yet, in those days with the pages of Scripture open and a loving guide, Jesus showed up.

Here is the great secret of the moment of my conversion. In that moment, God my Father spoke his Son into my heart by His Spirit. I was experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit who brought the real presence of Jesus to me through the word of the gospel that I read with Anton.

The final verse of the section in 2 Corinthians pulls the whole thought together. Paul continues with the theme of light and points back to Genesis chapter 1 where God spoke light into the darkness. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). The same God, the one living God, has spoken his Son into the darkness of our hearts, the light of his glory. Here the Father speaks the Son into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. The type of seeing that the Holy Spirit enables is a heart-seeing. We behold, we look onto, the glory of Jesus at the center of our being.

The reason why this work of the Holy Spirit is so transformative is because the heart is the center of the human person: the place that directs all of what we do, say, will, and long for. Whatever is playing in the cinema of your heart is the one thing that has control of your existence. The Holy Spirit enables our hearts to binge-watch the reality of Jesus Christ in the fullness of his glory.

The advent of streaming services demonstrates something about the way we fill ourselves with stories and visions. “Binge-watching is immersive,” wrote James Poniewozik, The New York Times’s chief TV critic. “It’s user directed. It creates a dynamic that I call ‘The Suck’: that narcotic, tidal feeling of getting drawn into a show and letting it wash over you for hours.” Binge-watching is completely immersive and has a totally encompassing nature.

Binge-watching in a lot of ways is not that different from other ways of consuming media, like a film or a book. The unique magic of cinema, especially on large screens, is our ability to enter the story, for us to walk into it and for it to become a part of us. “The movie screen is a window,” wrote David Thompson, “and the trick of the medium is to let us feel we can pass through it.” When a film first begins, we are conscious of the cinema, the people around us, our popcorn. As the movie continues, as the drama deepens, we lose all sense of what is happening around us and become completely and intensely connected to what is before us. We become captivated and what we are watching becomes a part of us.

The Holy Spirit enables the same experience of Jesus Christ, through our hearts by means of the preaching of the gospel. When we see the glory of the cross in the gospel, in our hearts, we fall in love with the sacrificial death on our behalf of the One True God, that is, Christ the Son. Through our loving delight in who Jesus is, our whole inner being is overrun by him. As that happens, Jesus starts to overrun our thoughts, our words, our feelings and our doings. Little by little as our vision of Jesus grows, as our delight in him increases, we slowly become like him.

Often, the problem for us is that we turn away from that wondrous image and become distracted. Instead, by continually setting Christ before ourselves, his image “enters, permeates, and transforms” us. “For disciples,” wrote Dietrich-Bonhoeff, “it is not possible to look at the image of the Son of God in aloof, detached contemplation; this image exerts a transforming power.”

What we need more of in the Christian life is a vision of Jesus Christ, of the One who was crucified on our behalf. As the eyes of our heart — our heart-seeing — remain on him and are captivated by him, we will become like him. Here is the simple truth at the heart of God’s work of renewal: Continual, deepening, remarkable encounters with the real Jesus Christ in the power of God’s Spirit.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the ongoing power by which we continually encounter and know Jesus. The secret to not letting our reel run out is continually seeking to know and see more of Jesus. I hope I’ve grabbed your attention at this point. If you’re feeling convicted, then drop what you’re doing and use the exercise below to encounter Jesus afresh in the power of his Spirit.