My wife showed me this picture recently and so I Googled it and ran across the website associated with it: JesusTattoo.org. I applaud them for their efforts with the video they produced and their creativity they used in it, but I think that there should have been some more investment into making it a little more professional looking. I believe that we in the church need to always put our best foot forwards when producing something to capture our audience.

Aside from that I really like the imagery. I love how we come in with our own “tattoos” or etchings from life and we see that Jesus takes them from us and places them on Himself. The Bible tells us in Isaiah that by His stripes we are healed. The very markings He took in punishment for something He did not even do was so that we wouldn’t have to bear those marks anymore.

Jesus didn’t do these things because He wanted us to live a comfortable and satisfied life. My community group has been going through a study called “Not A Fan” and in it the author of the book and study, Kyle Idleman, talks about how Jesus died so that we could live. However, we do that when we die as well. To really live with Jesus we must die daily. Why? So that Jesus can live in us.

The problem is that we are proud of our tattoos and instead of covering them up we show them off with pride. We love to broadcast our problems and share them with the world instead of turning them over to Jesus and letting Him bear the burden of them. We live through our problems instead of letting them die.

If we really want to be a follower and not a fan then we need to follow Jesus into that same death and let our old ways of doing things die, so that we can raise ourselves into the new life that He desperately wants to give us. The thing is that the new life is not easy. It will be hard, but it will be worth every dying moment.