I strongly suggest that all readers of this blog check out Casey’s recent blog of 5-23 (http://caseysliquidblog.blogspot.com/). Both of you will be enlightened...oh wait, Casey you are one them and Jess is the other!!
OK, I too, digress. Casey, once again you nail it.
In one way or the other-most of our presentations and definitions of the gospel deal solely with the question: what am I going to do about my sin? Is there then any connection to either the message of Jesus or His ‘Great Commission’ of Matthew 28:16-20?
If grace is but for guilt we are led to the inexorable conclusion that had we never sinned we wouldn’t need God, His way of life or His grace.
If grace if just for guilt, then what is to be an interactive, living relationship with God degenerates into a religion of Christianity which is more like a Clichéianity. This leaves us with the strange anomaly today of thinking that one can be a ‘Christian’ and not be a disciple of Christ.
2 events blessed me beyond belief this week. The first was a recovering narcotic addict who told how he found he could have a personal relationship with his ‘Higher Power’ through one who was called Jesus Christ. The second was from a dear sister in Christ who worships God in the Catholic tradition. I had written a letter to her defending her against ones in our community who attacked her form of worship. She wrote me a beautiful note extolling the beauties of entering the Kingdom as a little child and finding the ‘healing love of Christ’.
Neither one of these used the catchwords of the ABC’s of salvation Casey so eloquently exposed in his blog. Neither used the catchy religious slang and by-words that become like secret passwords among the indoctrinated. Yet both spoke of life. Real life Jesus gives as we follow Him.
I’d stand with either one of those on the path of life as we learn together the ‘healing love of Christ’, finding a righteousness beyond that of the Pharisee and learning from the Master how to live life, over any of the other countless religious elite who hold to the party line and clichés of a dead religion.
God bless you Monte and God bless you Shauna for opening my eyes to the purity of following Jesus into real life. And God bless you Mikey and Patti for proving to me once again that life in Jesus is a life no one could genuinely experience and want anything else. And God bless you Casey for challenging my thinking.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
MAKING ALL THINGS NEW
One of the embarrassing things about Jesus was His utter lack of concern in who He hung out with, touched or welcomed. Consider the leper in Mark 1:40. Lepers weren’t supposed to be approaching people but with the typical generosity of Jesus He welcomed him, spoke to him, challenged him and touched him. Not a touch like we would have given. The word there means to embrace or adhere to. I imagine Jesus helping the man off of his knees and bear hugging him as He welcomed him into his new life.
Jesus presents to us the opportunity to be joint heirs in nothing less than this new type of humanity-the Kingdom Community of the redeemed. All recovering sinners, all blessed of Him. Not seeing how exclusive we can be in drawing our circles but how inclusive we will be.
A community learning together the great transformation process that can happen through the new life received from above where we aren’t concentrating on doing religious things but learning to actually be loving people, from whom flow the living rivers of water.
This new type of humanity is the complete obliteration of social status-where we gather as Abraham’s seed. We have ‘put on Christ’ and now there are no distinctions, which are to be made (Galatians 3:26-29; Col. 3:10-11).
In this community made up of a new kind of humanity, we learn to discard everything that comes from other than the work and person of Christ in His crucifixion and beyond. (1 Cor. 2:2) Because He is ‘IT’. The Messiah who comes as the solution to the human problem. (2 Cor. 5:16-17)
There are not many who would be put on the world’s list of who’s who.
We are the list of the world’s last and least. But to us the Kingdom is available, forgiveness in abundance, grace without limit and the opportunity to become the kind of people He always intended us to be in spite of what we may have been in the past. This is the New Creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15).
And dare I say, ‘The making of all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).
Jesus presents to us the opportunity to be joint heirs in nothing less than this new type of humanity-the Kingdom Community of the redeemed. All recovering sinners, all blessed of Him. Not seeing how exclusive we can be in drawing our circles but how inclusive we will be.
A community learning together the great transformation process that can happen through the new life received from above where we aren’t concentrating on doing religious things but learning to actually be loving people, from whom flow the living rivers of water.
This new type of humanity is the complete obliteration of social status-where we gather as Abraham’s seed. We have ‘put on Christ’ and now there are no distinctions, which are to be made (Galatians 3:26-29; Col. 3:10-11).
In this community made up of a new kind of humanity, we learn to discard everything that comes from other than the work and person of Christ in His crucifixion and beyond. (1 Cor. 2:2) Because He is ‘IT’. The Messiah who comes as the solution to the human problem. (2 Cor. 5:16-17)
There are not many who would be put on the world’s list of who’s who.
We are the list of the world’s last and least. But to us the Kingdom is available, forgiveness in abundance, grace without limit and the opportunity to become the kind of people He always intended us to be in spite of what we may have been in the past. This is the New Creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15).
And dare I say, ‘The making of all things new’ (Rev. 21:5).
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