Anne Wilson: My Jesus

 

For a while, I went to a church that played this song in their worship music set. I guess it was some better than some of the other songs they sometimes chose, but it’s still not really a good song.

Cringe

The cringe is pretty strong with this one. Almost all of the lyrics are an appeal to emotions, especially if the listener is having a tough time.

The Good

I do want to point out one bit of the lyrics that says something worth saying…

Who would take my cross to Calvary? 

Pay the price for all my guilty? 

Who would care that much about me?

So, a mention, brief as it might be, of the cross and paying the price for…I’ll go ahead and say “sin”, because the phrasing in the song is awkward. Still, to borrow a phrase from Fighting For The Faith, it’s a gospel nugget, and that’s deserving of a small bit of respect.

The Bad

Almost all the rest of the song could be summed up with a statement like this, “Do you feel bad? Are you not happy with how you are? Then let Jesus come and change your life.”

Let me use some other people’s words to, I hope, explain what this song is really about…

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: Not Just a Problem with Youth Ministry

According to sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, most American teenagers believe in something dubbed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD). Within this MTD “religion,” God is a cosmic therapist and divine butler, ready to help out when needed. He exists but really isn’t a part of our lives. We are supposed to be “good people,” but each person must find what’s right for him or her. Good people will go to heaven, and we shouldn’t be stifled by organized religion where somebody tells us what we should do or what we should believe.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—the New American Religion

As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: 1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth." 2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions." 3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about ones self." 4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem." 5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

Why would I say that My Jesus is all about this concept of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism?

What does the song make the biggest deal about? The first verse asks if we have heavy burdens, if we’re weary, if we’re feeling empty and feel shame. The second is more of the same, but about broken dreams, wasted years, and wrong turns. To put it another way, and as TGC put it, God is made into your “cosmic therapist”, he’s there to help you solve the problems you have with your life.

And if you feel things like that? Well, here’s me singing a song about my Jesus, and telling you to let my Jesus change your life. Or, to put in Mohler’s words, "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about ones self."

So, why is this a problem?

There is no real gospel in this “Woe is me” message and it’s solution of life change. At best, it’s focusing on the wrong things.

If you look at the sermons in the New Testament, you’ll see a distinct lack of any “Are you feeling bad” appeal; instead, those men preached about sin and about Christ. In Acts 2, Peter preached against the people listening, because they’d had a part in crucifying Christ. He does the same in the sermon recorded in Acts 3. Peter in Acts 10 preaches about believing in Christ and thus receiving forgiveness of sins.

Our problem isn’t bad feelings, wasted years, or broken dreams. Those are at best mere symptoms. Our problem is sin. Our problem is that God is a law giver whose laws we have violated countless times, and he is a judge who has every reason to condemn us because of our countless violations of his law. Our problem isn’t that "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other…”, but that God wants us to be perfect, he expects us to be as perfect as he himself is perfect.

Focusing on our bad feelings, as if they are the important things, is egotistical. We are not the focus of the story, we are not the main players. We are the created beings. Our bad feelings are as nothing compared to the bad reality, the reality that we are sinners, that God would be completely just to condemn all of us.

We don’t need a “cosmic therapist”; we need a rescuer, a savior. We don’t need to be made to feel good, we need to be made clean, to have our sins washed away.

That is the message that is downplayed in this song.

Conclusion

This song is mostly junk food. Even the one good part of it is not worth wading through the rest of it. There’s just so many songs so much better than this bit of junk food.