It’s hard to escape the suffering around us, and it’s no secret that our broken world is hungry for peace. We groan for solutions. We hope that our civic and national leaders will reduce the conflicts, but things just seem to be getting worse. Where can we turn?
There’s only one viable solution, one answer, to a world in distress. And it can be found in just one place, or should I say, in just one person—Jesus.
Jesus is the central figure in history. No one person has received more attention in all of history, and no one has more followers than Jesus. And yet there is disagreement as to who Jesus is. Some see him as a good luck charm. Others consider him merely a symbol. Still, others see Jesus as a superior moral teacher. But that’s not good enough.
What the world needs to see, experience and know on a deep level is the real Jesus, the genuine Jesus—the authentic Jesus. This is the Jesus who changes lives, offers healing and calms troubled hearts.
I have been a follower of Jesus for most of my life. And yet even after a lifetime of knowing Jesus, only recently have I encountered the authentic Jesus. It happened through “The Chosen,” a multi-season television series that has been viewed by nearly 200 million people.
Like many I have talked with about “The Chosen,” I hesitated to watch even one episode because I thought it would be like most of the media portrayals of Jesus I had seen—wooden, formal and lifeless. In a word, inauthentic.
Then I watched the show.
For the first time, I saw Jesus as a loving, caring, likable person. In the episodes, drawn from the pages of Scripture, Jesus relates to people with genuine interest and love, and they are drawn to him. The Jesus of “The Chosen” is clearly divine, but also beautifully human and completely relatable.
This is why, in my work with the Come and See Foundation, our goal is to reach 95% of the world’s population by translating “The Chosen” into 600 languages. Through these efforts, it is our desire to see people from the most remote villages in Madagascar to living rooms across America experience a saving relationship with God through their identification with this authentic Jesus.
Woven into the pages of the Bible are the authentic stories of Jesus healing the lame, making the blind to see, and raising people from the dead. At the same time, Jesus showed compassion for the individuals he healed and for the thousands who gathered to hear him preach. He truly knew and cared for the chosen ones who gave up everything to follow him. I love that a television show brings this so beautifully to life.
