White Chocolate vs. Jesus Jihadist

My Belief

We have a flight attendant that is infamous at our airline. Most people only know him as “White Chocolate”. His real name is Sean and I consider him a friend. If you saw him you would definitely do a double take. He is a pasty white man with gray hair. That gray hair is braded into something that looks like it is straight from the Caribbean Islands. He walks with the “swagger” of a black girl and has all of the attitude to match. He announces to everybody that he is a strong black man and he can’t stand all these “damn white people”. He was born and lives in Newark NJ and needless to say has had a hard life.

I have flown with Sean many times and the most recent was last September. I am always careful about what conversations I get into with Sean because they usually end up in the gutter pretty quick. The last time I flew with him I had a great chance give him a “healthy dose of Jesus”. I was surprised to learn that Sean told me that he had grown up in and sometimes still attends a “Black Church”. He knew a decent amount about the cross and the Bible, but we fundamentally disagreed on one thing. He told me, “I know all this stuff, but I am still going to Hell”. For just a few moments Sean took down his costume of attitude and anger and told me that he knew he was a big time sinner and in his mind he still would never make it to be with the Lord.

I bring this up now because I have started bumping into Sean in the crewroom a lot lately. He always greets me in the same loud way. He greets me as, “Hey White Jesus, Hey Jesus Jihadist, or simply JJ for short.” He usually then goes into some sort of tirade in front of other people to the effect of, “everybody need to go to the White Jesus Church because there you can Smoke and Drink and Cheat and Lie and your still going to heaven. In the church of the Black Jesus we condemn you to Hell if you do these things.”

This is the most important thing in the entire Bible! Salvation is not predicated on your good behavior. Salvation is given freely by grace. God already knows that we are liars, cheats, and drunkards just to mention a few. This is the entire point for Jesus. Our performance is to substandard to get us to the Father, so Jesus made a way for us. I hope and pray that “White Chocolate” will understand and hear the message of grace that I keep trying to tell him about.

Scripture

Ephesians 2:8-9 ⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.

Application for Life

While Sean makes fun of the “Church of the White Jesus” his description of it is absolutely correct. Jesus’s church is the church of tax collectors, cheaters, unclean, adulterers, drunkards and filthy sinners. Grace simply means that God has given it to us when we could not do it ourselves. We strive to be like Christ, but at heart we are all still dirty sinners covered in the blood of grace. Don’t think for a moment that you will ever stop being a sinner and some how become a “Good Christian”. NO such animal exists. Every time I fall off the wagon and let my old sin nature get the best of me, I am reminded of grace. As I sit there in my filthy wrong all I can do is come to the foot of the cross and thank the Lord for covering me in his merciful grace.