When I first moved to Dallas for seminary, stepping into Dallas Theological Seminary, I felt a new sense of identity forming. After all the classes, the training, and eventually my position at a new church in Frisco, I felt, for the first time, like a pastor. People saw me as one, and I started to believe it too. The role fit, and I was stepping into it with confidence.
But each time I crossed the Red River back to Oklahoma, something changed. As soon as I was around my family and old friends, I felt like a fraud. No matter what I’d done in seminary, no matter the work I’d put into pastoring a church, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t belong in that role. These people really knew me. They saw my flaws, my struggles, my past mistakes. To them, I wasn’t “Pastor Me”; I was just… me. It was as if everything I’d accomplished was stripped away, and I was left feeling exposed, almost like a charlatan.
This isn’t unique to me. It’s a common experience. When we’re close to someone, we see the unpolished, real version of them. So when we hear others praising them, it’s natural to feel a bit skeptical, as if we have the “real” picture while others only see the polished version. We might even think, “If only they knew the whole story.”
That brings me to Luke 4. When Jesus returned to His hometown of Nazareth, He experienced something similar, but with a difference. In Nazareth, people saw Him as just “Joseph’s son”, the boy they’d watched grow up. They couldn’t reconcile that image with the idea of Him as the Messiah. Jesus highlighted their disbelief with a well-known phrase: “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.” He knew that they couldn’t get past their ordinary, familiar view of Him to see who He truly was.
But with Jesus, there’s a twist. Unlike any of us, He didn’t have flaws. The people of Nazareth weren’t holding Him back because of any real failings or mistakes on His part. Instead, they were blinded by their own assumptions and their sense of familiarity with Him. He seemed too ordinary, too close to home to be anything special.
And isn’t that our struggle too, especially here in America? We’ve grown up with Jesus everywhere—He’s in our schools, our politics, our holidays. We know the stories, the songs, and the sayings. It’s almost as if He’s our American God, comfortably woven into our culture. But that familiarity can numb us to His reality. We lose sight of His greatness and His true identity, just as the people of Nazareth did. We reduce Him to someone manageable, ordinary, “one of us,” rather than the extraordinary Savior He is.
This is the danger of being a cultural Christian. When Jesus becomes a familiar fixture in our culture, we risk losing sight of the awe and reverence that He deserves. We might think we know Him, but that “familiarity” might be the very thing keeping us from truly seeing Him. Just as Jesus warned the people of Nazareth, we’re at risk of missing out on the fullness of who He is because we’ve become too comfortable with a version of Him that fits into our everyday lives.
The question for us is: Can we look beyond our assumptions and rediscover Jesus as He really is? Or will we let our own version of familiarity keep us from the profound reality of who He truly is? It’s as if we’re standing on the mount of transfiguration, yet still only seeing the Jesus from the bottom of the hill.
I pray that God will let us see Him in His transformed grandeur—a vision that shakes us to our core and brings us to our knees anew.
