Thankfully, Casey keeps me up on some of the great controversies in the church today. Apparently there are those out there being pilloried for actually encouraging people to become Disciples of Jesus. To follow Jesus and learn how to become the kind of people who treat others the way Jesus did. In confidence and quietness encouraging others to live the ‘Jesus Life’. Hmmm?
The genuine disciples see this and find the need to Trust Jesus only. They fearlessly stand in His Kingdom professing allegiance to Jesus and following Him and learning His kind of life (eternal). And with each new stand the religious elite object and stammer, heresy. Consider if the term ‘reformed theology’ had not already become part of the hierarchies accepted religious language and someone started a ‘reform’ movement in the church today.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realize what the lords of religious knowledge would scream. Reform? We don’t need to reform what the bible teaches, what the church believes, what we sing and do. Heresy. Heresy and death at the stake to all those who wish to reform what the church has believed for 1500 years (or 100, 500 or 2000 years).
Of course, we are too ‘reformed’ to burn people at the stake today. We write books about them, magazine articles and the authoritarian church hierarchy with all their seminarian influence, publicly brand these true Disciples in the kind of life Jesus actually lived, heretics. Swinging a sword of vile vengeance and reproachful hate in the name of accepted, staid doctrine.
I pray to God on behalf of these new, bold, reformers of the current perverted christian tradition to succeed and bring us back to the life Jesus actually made available to us to live today. A life that finds following Him into discipleship the most important thing in life. To once again emerge as salt and light, not in the four walls of our buildings but within the borders of our community, out into our Valley to the uttermost parts of the earth.
Let the rivers flow again and bring the Life of Jesus to this hurting world.
Reign again King Jesus and let us seek first Your Kingdom.
Break us away from the religious hierarchy of a tyrannical church.
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Can I just say AMEN!
ReplyDeleteWho wouldn't want a life that is GOOD and lived always with HIM? I think some people work so hard to be unhappy for the sake of God...to punish themselves, others, destroy hope? I wish they could know the GOOD NEWS of Jesus and enjoy life with HIM. Some of the first words recorded of God speaking....."It is Good!" He liked what He did and He liked US! And all Jesus asked of us what to Like Him back and Like each other. Too bad we weigh down such hope with such bondage....and hatred.
Loved your blog!
Jess
Brian,
ReplyDeleteYou have said in a few choice words what I have been striving to say for the last year. It is no wonder you are a gifted teacher and pastor. Thanks so much for writing. I love to listen to the DBC pod casts.
Absolutely brilliant!
Its one thing when a movement becomes fixed and static; like clay that has been worked for years but eventually hardens, yet another when that movement denies the very grit and mess from which it was spawned to the next group seeking to understand and realize afresh.
We’ve seen it in all sorts of movements: God moves on some earnest, risk taking people. A spark turns into a flame and from out of little comes a movement – powerful and alive. It then gets observed, analyzed and organized and after a year or two of amazing growth It gets figured out “if we do such and such, we’ll be able to get more involved and reach more people if we can market it this way and get these speakers and…” next thing you know, the movement begins to limp and need pushing and it starts to crawl and then the ‘enterprise’ is shrinks.
The messiness and exploration of radical love and earnest seeking becomes a formula and the rough edges are smoothed out and …viola! The Goose has flown. Oops.
I think we can easily hold all too tightly to doctrines and formulas and all too easily miss the rest of what God has been saying to us. I have experienced this very thing in my own life; radically called from darkness into God’s marvelous light by His incredible humility towards me, only to find myself years later in the school of the Pharisee, among the doctrine police and a “who’s who” among heresy hunters. I could wield the apologetics sword at anyone coming my way, but the very raw and astounding grace that stood waiting for me with arms open wide when I had all but totally blasphemed Him was the very grace I had forgotten to show others.
Brian you are a clear voice of the Kingdom and I so deeply appreciate you.
Mike