373,858,261.
If you could stack that many pennies without them falling over, you’d have a tower of pennies 360 miles high. To try to wrap your brain around that number, the tallest mountain on the planet is Mount Everest, and its peak is 5.498 miles high.
You’d need to stack 65 Mount Everests on top of each other — and then add half of another one — to match that tower of pennies, which represents the number of views on the He Gets Us YouTube channel at the time this was written.
And that’s just YouTube. It doesn’t count the 100 million people who had been reached by the campaign up to October 2022, or the viewers who saw their ads play during the last two Super Bowls.
We’re gonna need more pennies, y’all.
And yet, as I’ve seen the firestorm that these commercials have caused among believers, I’m convinced that even though Jesus gets us, we don’t really get Him.
If we understood Him, we’d know that when He saw the crowds harassed and helpless, He had compassion on them. All of them, not just the ones following Him.
If we understood Him, we’d know that His compassion toward us isn’t based on our commitment to Him. He washed the feet of the one who betrayed Him and the one who denied Him, as well as the one who leaned back against His chest. That’s three different levels of commitment experiencing one mind-blowing level of compassion.
God's compassion toward us isn’t based on our commitment to Him. Share on XIf we understood Him, we’d recognize that He paid the ultimate price at the cross for us to be loved, known, set free and delivered. We’d also realize that those who have been changed by that love will also go to extravagant lengths to love Him in return. A story of perfume being broken over the feet of Jesus by one of those extravagant worshippers comes to mind.
We read about it in Matthew 26: a gathering in the house of a leper (would Jesus wash his feet?); a woman with an alabaster jar who was quite possibly a prostitute (surely Jesus wouldn’t wash her feet!); then, the loud crash, the smell quickly filling the room as the hair of Jesus became wet and matted from the liquid poured over Him. And then, in the middle of such a beautiful, intimate, messy expression, the social media posts started filling up the feeds.
“Why this waste?” #saveourplanet
“Who does she think she is?” #gohome
“This could have fed all the hungry in our city!” #loveyourneighbor
Here’s the kicker: those criticisms weren’t coming from the world or the religious leaders. They came from the disciples.
The very ones following Jesus didn’t get Jesus, and so Jesus had to tell the ones who should have been worshipping Him to stop bothering the woman who was.
The very ones following Jesus didn’t get Jesus. If they had, they wouldn't have bothered the one who did. Share on X“Stop bothering her,” He said. “She’s the only one here who recognizes that I won’t always be here, and I’m gonna make sure everyone knows about it.” (That’s my paraphrase of Matthew 26:10-13, but feel free to take a minute to read it for yourself)
Worship is costly, and the ones who get Jesus understand that, and gladly pay it. They’re like the man who found the hidden treasure and then went away in his joy and sold everything he had to buy the field with the treasure.
One man’s worship is often another man’s waste, and yet Jesus doesn’t tell both men that they were both right. He draws a clear line in favor of the one buying the field, breaking the jar, and pushing all of his chips to the middle of the table.
Jesus is drawn to those who go all in, and until we have, we’ll find ourselves wondering why the all in people didn’t make a more sensible choice.
But the people who really get how much Jesus gets us won’t be the ones living safe and sensible lives. They’ll be the ones doing whatever it takes to make sure that His name is lifted up because they know the truth that Jesus spoke when He told them that He’d draw all men to Himself when He is exalted (check out John 12:32).
And when we get that, we’ll tell everyone about the God who gets us.
No matter what it costs, or what others have to say about it, because what they see as waste will actually be our worship.
