I rarely, if ever, watch any of the cable news talking head shows anymore. But tonight I left Headline News on while I was cooking dinner, and I caught Glenn Beck interviewing Joel Osteen. A lot of Christian thinkers have a lot of questions about Osteen, but Beck beautifully distilled most of them by asking (my paraphrase): “if you’re a Christian leader, shouldn’t you talk about Jesus more?”
Osteen made a tip of the hat to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as tenets of faith, but it took him less than 3 seconds on the subject before he shifted to talking about “life beyond that”. Now, I get the importance of talking about living the Christian life in practical terms — it’s good and right and important to do so. But the most practical thing you can do as a Christian is to turn your attention toward the Cross and what it accomplished and to fix your mind upon the person of Jesus Christ as our Lord, our great high priest, our savior, our righteousness, our God; when we fail to do that, our attempts at “Christian living” invariably go badly awry. So I worry about ministries that spend too much time “beyond the cross” because their message starts to become indistinct from Tony Robbins-style “we’re all okay, let’s be better”, diminishing the importance of the Cross and encouraging us to think more highly of ourselves and think less frequently about the place of Jesus in our worlds — which amounts to a sick kind of baptized idolatry.
But, if Your Best Life Now isn’t as “best” or as “now” as you want it to be, I suppose you can take the more modest step of buying Osteen’s new book, “Become a Better You”.
