Shakespeare

I have a band that I really like that most people have never heard of. To be honest I don’t know if they still are around or doing anything, but I still pop in a CD occasionally and veg out as I drive down the road. The band is “Everybody Duck” and they came out of Hume Lake camp in California. They have some cool late 90’s guitar driven songs that are fun and really hit the sweet spot when you need to travel light.
One of their songs is called “Shakespeare.” The chorus simply says this:
“You do Jesus/Just as well as you do Shakespeare/ and frankly that’s not very good at all/
The church is your theater/ and tradition is your script/ but where you gonna be when the final curtain fall?”
It is not deep meaning rock and roll, but the point is good. Most of us do our Christian lives about as well as we could do Hamlet. Remember reading Shakespeare in high school and having no idea what he was talking about? I remember sitting in class at Kirby High as Mrs. Patterson tried to explain it to us. I never got it. The key to understanding Shakespeare is the same as understanding the King James Bible: you have to speak Elizabethan English.
My point is this; we will never get our relationship right with Jesus until we invest in it. We spend time reading the bible, listening to others teach and praying through scripture and we develop a deeper appreciation for what Jesus had to tell us. But most of us treat it like we did high school Shakespeare: we simply endure it.
Jesus told us that to truly be his follower we had two things to do: Love God and love others. Matthew 22:40 tells us that all the rest of the bible narrative rests on those two things. When we invest in those areas of life, we find that we have the ability to love God and others at deeper levels than we ever imagined.
So, are you doin’ Jesus like you do Shakespeare?