In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s typical well-turned style…reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Bonhoeffer talks about the ‘exclusiveness’ of Christ: 

One admires Christ according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for his ideas.  Only one thing one doesn’t do:  one doesn’t take him seriously.  That is, one doesn’t bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation.  One maintains a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows no serious encounter to take place.  I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman—just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and Kant…Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me…Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously.  Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment.  And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.   

Father…I pray that all of us will grow in the revelation, experience, and understanding of our ‘encounter’ with you.  I pray that you give us an increasing desire to have  you claim our lives entirely.  For me, this is the most difficult thing to do…submitting my total self and will to you.  I live in the illusion of what I think ‘my’ life is…and I realize how I guard ‘my’ life and time ‘so that’ I can sustain ‘my’ little world that I think works for me.   I know in my spiritual head and heart that your way is the perfect way…but I let my flesh head and heart rule so much of how I use my time in ‘my’ life.   If I am to get unstuck…it must come from more of an encounter with you.   Amen