Being in the ministry as a youth pastor can lead to some very awkward predicaments. Some of those involved people, and some of them involved problems. Sometimes it can be the preaching of strange passages, and sometimes it can be unclear planning. But besides people, problems, preaching, and planning, there are two “P”s that will always give you problems in the ministry: printers and projectors. Printers would take this entire booklet, so we’ll save that for another day.
Projectors are supposed to be simple: you plug and it plays. Using it with a computer that had a famous ad campaign twenty years ago which ran “It just works” should have made it even more simply. However, churches don’t always have the latest and greatest… and the youth ministry is where the outdated items go—not to die—but to get even more used and dated.
So, that explains why one Wednesday night I was standing on the top of the podium in our teen room reaching towards the ceiling. Our projector had started to show its age by turning the entire screen into a purple tint of whatever was on the screen. The only way we could fix it was to power-cycle it. That should have been simple, but the projector was plugged into an outlet in the ceiling about 10 feet above the ground. Thankfully, it “only” took about a year to upgrade to something a little more reliable.
But are there any projectors that are fully reliable? And if fully reliable, are there any that give a pixel-perfect representation of its source?
In the opening lines of the book of Hebrews, we read that Jesus is “the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature…” (Hebrews 1:3, NASB). A projector typically takes a source’s image, and then it recreates it and outputs it to a secondary display for all to see. However, what Jesus did is even greater than that.
Over and over in the Bible, we read about God being invisible and that no person has ever seen him. How do you make visible something that is invisible? And, how would we know that the representation is authentic if we cannot see the source? In Jesus Christ, those concerns vanish. Not only does the book of Hebrews begin with a Christ-glorifying opening, but the book of John opens with a similar style. There, John said this of the appearance of Christ: “No one has ever seen God. But the unique One, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us” (John 1:18, NLT).
In our youth room, the computer source and the secondary projector and display were entirely different pieces of equipment. And, those pieces of equipment malfunctioned in such a way that it distorted the entire image that it was supposed to show. To even fix it temporarily, it had to be entirely disconnected from its source, lose its power, and then we hoped for the best.
Christian, when life, doubt, worry, culture, and everything else in this world begins to distort the picture and nature of God that we see in his word, go back to the perfect representation that he has shown us—his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Father, when my mind tries to recreate an inaccurate image of you in my heart, remind me that you have given me an exact image of yourself in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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