The poet Christian Wiman, who returned to his faith after having wandered from it, wrote in My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer that “Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs.”

The challenge that followers of Jesus face is to push aside as best we can the deformations, including those we generate ourselves, in order to move a few steps closer to the reality of Jesus. Because for all of our failures of his followers, and despite all the things we might get wrong, we keep coming back. Our hearts were won over not by Jesus’s moral demands but by his grace, not by his miracles as much as by his wounds, not because he needs us but because we need him.

One of the more incisive comments about the gap we often see between faith and works sticks with me today: that for too many people of the Christian faith, Jesus is a “hood ornament.” The man who told me that was Russell Moore.

Peter Wehner https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/russell-moore-sbc