I am often amused at the ways followers of Jesus try to “Christianize” some of the most absurd things. I once owned a small tin of “Testamints”: powerful tiny breath mints with a Bible verse on the wrapper. T-shirts and refrigerator magnets are popular places to present passages of Scripture. One of my favorites is the “Buddy Christ”: a Jesus action-figure who has a big smile on his face and is giving you the thumbs-up.

But what are we saying about the Gospel when we equate Jesus with toys? Can the story of God, Creator of the entire universe, manifest in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world, be contained on the side of a box of breath mints or a fish on the back of a car? While such instances make me smile, it also makes me concerned to have the hope of the world reduced to bite-sized form.

I don’t think such things are necessarily evil (I own a t-shirt that says “Jesus is my Homeboy”!) The modern tendency in our busy lives is to rush through the Jesus-thing. The assumption is that slapping the name of Jesus on something, like a bumper sticker, automatically makes it something that is worth God’s time or gives Him glory. Busy-ness rears its ugly head, prayers get rushed, sick and lonely people go unvisited, all the while trusting He’ll be the kind of parent that will gush with pride no matter what shoddy work we thrust His way.

C.S. Lewis is attributed as once saying that the world doesn’t need more Christian writers, but more good writers that are Christian. I do believe Jesus gratefully receives any sincere offering we humbly lay before Him. There’s no chart that says your gift must be “this” good (which is good news since the world wants nothing more than to compare how “good” you are to others). But should His graciousness excuse us from giving Christ our absolute best? Shouldn’t Jesus be our first commitment instead of receiving only the leftovers of our time and energy? Doesn’t this mean that we can glorify God when we teach, repair, cook, farm, help customers, stock shelves, write sermons, drive trucks to the very best of your abilities?

I was in the marching band in high school. Whenever we performed our entire show from start to finish (at practice, a football game, competition, etc.), the director held a stopwatch. If he liked what he saw and heard, he’d run the stopwatch. As soon as something was done incorrectly, he would stop it, starting it again when the show was good. So at the end of the show, he would tell us how much time we had accumulated. We might win trophies in our competition or not, but the only score we really cared about was whether we’d all performed well enough to receive a higher time. We weren’t concerned with how we matched up to the other bands (at least, not much) but with beating ourselves. As Christian, shouldn’t we too be striving to present a better offering to our God; the very best we have?

The writer in Hebrews got this notion when he challenged his readers: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus demonstrates a life in which He gave everything to do the will of His Father, the best he could. We certainly don’t have to be Jesus. But if he gave everything to love and save us, shouldn’t we try as hard we can too?