RICHER THAN RIGHT

What rail did we take bringing us off track in discipleship? Our dialogue has become splitting hairs over issues of Christianity rather than a discussion and presentation of a person, Jesus Christ. Our ‘Christianity’ has become our doctrines and thus it is more important to swear allegiance to our doctrines than to our King. Jesus has become just another Buddha who said on his death bed to his disciples who were concerned on how best to remember him; don’t remember me, it is not my person but my teachings that matter.

What matters in Christianity today is apparently having the right answers to the right questions. Whether you even believe them isn’t the issue, you just have to profess to believe them or worse, commit to things you don’t even profess to believe.

Get enough of the right answers you are in, too many wrong answers you are off to the bad place. Which ones do you have to answer correctly? Do you have to even believe your answers are true or just have them? Can you just profess them, even if you don’t believe them? Can you just commit to them even if you don’t profess to believe them? How many wrong answers can you have? Which ones are worth more points? Will they be multiple choice, fill in the blank or T or F? To which did the ‘thief’ profess?

Ask yourself, what is the importance of believing that Jesus is Divine?
Is it to just to have the right answer? Is it to get points to add to the score to make the cut? Is it to have superior knowledge from which to manufacture bullets to hurt others badly in lively debates?

Surely you are thinking, no, it isn’t anything like that at all. It isn’t to have the right answer. If I believe Him to be Divine, to have come here and established a beachhead of divine life in this little far away place we call earth, then I am going to relate to my world differently. More importantly, I will relate to Him differently. I will make following Him into life the most important thing as I learn how to become the kind of person who lives the life He described.

I will evaluate the world in which I live and the situations I go through from a different perspective and will come to see this life I live as one lived in a completely different world than the one described by the lords of knowledge.

Maybe, in this world then, it is safe to tell the truth. A world where His advice not to worry can be taken seriously. Maybe I really do live in a world where He reigns and rules and will see to my care. Perhaps I can forgive those who mistreat and abuse me. A world where He can spread before me a table right in the presence of my enemies and I might even say to them, 'Why don't you sit down with me for a bite to eat'.

Isn’t that richer than being right?

THE PARADIGM SHIFT

One of the most important steps one can take into genuine, meaningful, life-changing discipleship to Jesus is to make the paradigm switch from Jesus being merely a nice religious figure to one who actually knew what He was talking about. The need is there to begin to view Jesus as an intelligent person who has the most important information on the most important subjects of life.

If we would view Him as encompassing truth outside the religious realm, like His first followers understood Him, we would see one in whom dwells all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. If He does have that capacity for wisdom and knowledge, then you can begin to understand why He said if you learn to put into practice the things that I have taught, you will know the truth about life and the truth about life will set you free.

Who else can you turn to, realistically, in order to learn how to become a fully formed human being living in this world? To be free to be the kind of person we are meant to be? Who else would be your teacher? Really, the list is very, very, short.

Take any of them and ask if this would be true: If you put my teachings into practice, then you will be my students and I will be your teacher. You will come to know the truth about life and this world and in knowing that truth, you will never again be ruled by unsatisfied desires and will find fulfillment in becoming the fully formed human being you were designed to be.

That’s really the test isn’t it? Putting the things into practice. Who is it that offers life to the fullest extent? Jesus could say as an intelligent human being who knew a thing or two about life, ‘If you learn to put into practice the things that I teach you, your life will be like a house built upon solid rock. Even the most devastating of life’s challenges won’t be able to tear it down’.

LEARNING LOVE

My brief stay in the hospital for a rather minor surgical repair of failing body parts and my current recuperation at home has forced me to consider in silence much of where I have come since I last visited a hospital on an extended retreat some 11 years ago.

I have learned that I am not my body and as a primarily spiritual being who will never stop existing I have realized that inner transformation is paramount. This can only happen in discipleship to Jesus.
Matthew 7:17, the good tree cannot bear bad fruit.
Proverbs 4:23 Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life.

I am redeemed in order to be continually transformed in the way of Christ. This transformation happens in the inner person where the Great Command of Luke 10:27 is realized (to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your strength and all of your mind and your neighbor as yourself). But, I am not to act as if I love God and my neighbor; I am to have a character totally saturated with His kind of love. If not, even loving God and by extension my neighbor will be an impossible burden leading to frustration and failure.

Trying to love without actually learning His kind of love produces angry, bitter and contemptuous Christians who find discipleship a hopelessly burdensome task.

However, being permeated with His kind of love will produce a life adequate for every occasion, a well of water spring up to eternal life that Jesus spoke of (John 4:14) and rivers of living water to those around us in desperate need. This is God’s conspiracy and one we are called to take part in as co-conspirators. This is why He is more interested in the character we are building than the doctrine we are amassing.

Knowledge of and intimacy with the doctrinal tenants of the church will not produce Christlike character. You can look around and see this for yourself. It is not that it is unimportant; it just will not create inner transformation.

The future He has planned for us will be based on the character being forged right now in the crucible of life by His grace. This happens in discipleship to Christ as we learn a life that will never become obsolete.

REIGN AGAIN KING JESUS

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?

My own analysis of what has happened down through the centuries to the Disciples of Christ is that every few hundred years they must peal away from the authoritarian rule of the church. Like everything man gets their hands on, they want to take control and exercise dominion. It is how we were created and a good thing, until we think our dominion is paramount. The tension always leans towards the mighty exercising power over the masses. The church has constantly done this and is doing this today.

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.

Disciples who draw on the rich resources of the Kingdom Among Us, where out of our innermost beings flow the rivers of living water Jesus spoke of.

Let the rivers flow again and bring the Life of Jesus to this hurting world.

Look around for yourself and draw your own conclusions. The evidence is in and the verdict needs to be read. The protectors of the purity of doctrine have failed to lead people into a life of transformation, overflowing with the goodness of a Majestic God. Let us become co-conspirators again in HIS great plan of overcoming the kingdoms of this world with the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. Please Lord Jesus, put the Hallelujah back into the Hallelujah chorus.

Reign again King Jesus and let us seek first Your Kingdom.

Break us away from the religious hierarchy of a tyrannical church.

LIVING LIFE AS A CO-CONSPIRATOR

As a disciple, learning how to live life is for the benefit of the world.

Each of you as followers of Christ, have a prophetic responsibility in the community in which you live. That is the salt and the light stuff we talk of.

You will only find that as a reality when you learn your place in the heavenlies right now. This is why we want to go to heaven right now.

Heaven is here. God is in action. Now is your time.

Of course this doesn’t preclude the grand future we have in His presence where we will know as we are known. I don’t want to diminish our hope in any way. But heaven will take care of itself and while we look forward to what the ancients called our ‘long-home’ our life is lived here and the life lived here has a meaning and a purpose that stretches far beyond the borders of time.

This invitation God extends is to enter the Trinitarian community and live as a co-conspirator. To become a vital part of what God is about in this very short time of human history (very short from a cosmological standpoint and very, very unlikely). To become a part of a community of loving people who are redeemed and everything He had hoped the created human being to be.

So that the whole universe can become conscious of the presence and goodness of God. We become a lesson to all of the powers in the universe of the goodness and greatness of God. You will be an exhibit. Get a new understanding of who you are; Ask yourself what would it be like to be on eternal exhibit? To be that valuable.

That is what God wants and He makes it available to everyone. It is available because God is right here. And the Kingdom draws nigh unto others in the form of those who have this new life, this new life received from above now immersed in the reality of the Trinitarian presence of God. This is the bottom line of why it is not difficult to make discipleship the most important thing in your life.

STAYING IN THE GAME

When I have an unpleasant experience while trying to minister to people.

When I am the object of unfair, unjust and unfounded criticism.

When my best efforts to reach out to someone in need is met with rebuke.

What keeps me in the game?

The God who fills the entire universe-wants to be intimate with me. He planned for me from the beginning-has a plan for my ongoing existence. A pretty good trade.

I view the Gospel of Jesus as an invitation to greatness.

It is not an invitation to debase, hate or demean myself.

It is an invitation to be, as a disciple, a co-conspirator with an eternal God, as I accept and respond to His loving invitation to Trust Christ.

As I become more intimate with Him, in this interactive relationship, my desire to sin diminishes as sin itself becomes less and less interesting.

Living a life where readiness to holiness is more appealing.

Seeing my relationship with Him as one that goes beyond the borders of, but certainly includes, forgiveness of sins. Yet, if all I know of Jesus is He has died for my sins, I don’t know Him.

If all I know of God is that He has forgiven me, I don’t know God.

He forgave me to introduce me into the richness of His purposes for me.

His purpose now in a life that will never end.

This is the With-God life.

This universe we live in is itself a manifestation of the greatness of the Word and Voice of God. In it’s vastness and wonders we hear God speaking and see His handiwork and ongoing creativity. If we are to believe what His first followers thought of Him, He is the One holding it all together even now.

Colossians 1:13-20 and Hebrews 1:1-4. They understood Him to be the One in whom all wisdom and all the treasures of knowledge resides.

The Trinity, holding everything together and conspiratorial in their intent.
The ultimate reality about this universe you live in is the Trinity.

Want to know what is at the center of this universe?

God and this lovely community of Divine Persons.

Enjoying and sharing together the goodness they have.

The members of the Trinity have been there forever and will be there forever enjoying themselves and granting us the privilege of sharing their kind of life and the power to be a co-conspirator of His, overcoming the kingdoms of this world…the evil in this world. You are very much part of this. Then together, as a community of loving persons immersed in His ongoing goodness, we are prepared to march into the evil armed with His goodness.

That’s what keeps me going, keeps me in the game as I know He has been given say over everything and is going to be with me every step of the way until the job is done.

Tsunami

2:30 AM and the Tsunami sirens begin to sound. “Evacuate, this is not a drill”, it keeps blaring. From a stupor of restful sleep, having drifted off listening to the sounds of the ocean waves through an open window, I try to make sense of what I am hearing. First I think the cops are calling someone to come out with their hands up. No, too much TV still in the brain.

When I realize what is being blared into my skull I realize, something serious is happening. We check the computer and discover the facts of Japan’s earthquake and understand that size of earthquake could really cause what they are warning us of. The first waves aren’t going to hit for 4 hours but we decide to go ahead and get in the car and drive to ‘Higher Ground’. Besides, it is raining, cold and windy. I really don’t want to be reduced to hiking up the mountain at the last opportunity of escape. I have a survival kit in the car so we have food, water and a stove for cooking, so off we go.

It is then it strikes me, how very much we are like what God uses as a metaphor: Sheep. A herd mentality. When we come to the first realistic parking area, it is absolutely jammed pack full of cars. Probably 150-200 cars taking up every available area to park in. I remember that next to this area is another pull off with another parking lot. I literally go 15 feet further down Highway 26 and turn into another parking lot that even has a bathroom!! Not one car in the whole lot. All the sheep are herded together. I back into a spot in the dark at 3:30 in the AM and thank the Lord that He is not allowed us to stray so far that He could not find us. We didn’t make it back to our cabin until noon and it was all for naught, or was it? I wonder of His creation, of what is happening in it, to it and because of it. I realize how important I am to Him, how grateful I am for His goodness and care. And to realize we are perfectly safe no matter what happens.

For us it turned out, but it doesn’t always turn out that way in the human situation, it surely didn’t for hundreds in Japan for whom I mourn.

How can God allow all of this to happen if He is good? The answer has to be: Because He is good. He will redeem all of the human suffering in His time and in His way. Because He is good. If He isn’t good, a Tsunami is the least of my worries.