BETTER THAN ABC's

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.

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).

THE FIRST STEP BACK

If one wished to make discipleship to Jesus the most important thing in their life, what should they do? If they wish to leave the constraints of religious performance and external conformance behind, how would one proceed?

I would encourage you to stay away. Really, I encourage you to stay away.
If you can, you probably should.
Genuine disciples simply can’t stay away.
They have nowhere else to go.

If you are comfortable in the garb of religious clichés, Christian morals and church doctrine determined by those with the most authority and influence, you should stay there, for discipleship will be for you a burden and an immense disappointment. See: Matthew 13:44-46 for example.

If you just can’t stay away, then you have made the first step toward genuine, inner transformation where the work must be done. But let’s be clear, you have to do something. Discipleship is not passive, it is active. But the active part is not in the area of trying to obey Him, being righteous or perfect. Leave all hope in that direction behind. We aren’t striving for obedience; we are putting effort into becoming a certain kind of person for whom obedience becomes spontaneous. We do that by doing the things within our power, which will enable Him to do what He has been waiting to do all along; change every aspect of our entire person into one fully functioning human being. While we have a part to play in this transformation process, we will never trust our part. Remember, we are learning to Trust Christ, the essence of the good news of the Kingdom.

If the idea that you have to actually DO something to enable God to do something else in your life appalls you, you have hit a major obstruction to further development. If you want transformation to simply strike you like lightening in the midst of a church service, then retreat silently into your Christianity and religious observances. If that is your idea of discipleship, you will never have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, necessary, as Jesus said to enter the Kingdom of the Heavens. You will have a righteousness that is defined by external performance of religious activities and nailing down the corners of your pristine doctrine.

If you are willing to embark, to move beyond this initial roadblock into making being with Jesus learning to be like Him the most important thing in your life, take a walk. Really, take a long walk. Leave the technology (all of it) behind and settle this issue for at least today. Will I make following Jesus the most important thing in life? It is the most important decision you will make every day of the rest of your existence, which will never end.
Will, I today, choose discipleship to Jesus as the single most crucial aspect of my life?
TO BE CONTINUED…
On your next walk: Learning the language of the Kingdom.

A CONFESSION

A confession. As I live in Christ, following Him, albeit in an imperfect way into discipleship to be the person God has always intended me to be, I become less and less interested in presenting Christianity to people. I don’t want to invest my life into trying to get people to align with or adhere to Christianity. I want people to find what I have found in the person of Christ.

The lovely, winsome, intelligent, intriguing and living person of Jesus Christ.

Since childhood I have always questioned the prevailing assumptions being presented in the church and was regularly thumped (both literally and figuratively). I went underground for years and built walls that almost destroyed my soul. God never gave up, even when Christianity did.

I found new life in Christ. A person. Not a religion, church or sect. And it has been Christ, not Christianity that has begun to heal my hurting soul. Redeemed by His blood and saved by His life.

Christianity was a tag hung on some by the world, then taken over by the church and now argued over as to who is and who isn’t really in. Count me out. In Lebanon it is the name of a political group, in America it is the description of our historical roots and in other places it is the side of bloody protests. Perhaps it is time to give the word back to the world that gave it to us. Like Cassandra in Greek Mythology where Apollo's cursed gift of prophecy became a source of endless pain and frustration, the moniker ‘Christian’ has been an untold source of sorrow and hurt, wars and blood.

Let’s be honest, ‘Christianity’ is now a ‘religion’ and the world isn’t buying what we are selling wrapped in the description they invented. For good reason the world has had a bellyful of our sermonizing and in-fighting. What we are selling is a merchandized, commercialized, consumer driven religion that requires adherents to bow at the shrine of the influential writers and speakers who apparently are the gatekeepers and protestant popes of this religious movement.

Often what we are selling is not consistent with the person of Jesus in whom we are finding a life of such transformative power we have had no trouble considering the cost as the best bargain ever presented in life.

I am too old to speak to a movement or start a trend. I have neither the energy, the patience, the intelligence nor probably the right. I pray for those God is rising up in the midst of our religious culture who will say by their life, no more. No more religion. No more consumerism. No more to ‘Christianity’. Just followers of Christ into the kind of life He intends, becoming all that He intended us to be and by our lives shut the mouths of kings. For it might be His intent that this new breed of Christ followers will be the way by which He will sprinkle many nations with Himself; where the kings shall shut their mouths at him; for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider (Is. 52:15)

IRS

OK, some thoughts as I exit the federal building in Boise. Ah, what to say!

I know what I would have said in days gone by. Very practiced and trained in the weapons of this flesh. I know what one living in this world would say. I used to live there. I know how one entrenched in the warfare of this world would act. It was my old battlefield. Frustrated? That's an understatement. Discouraged. Rarely have I felt more. An Imbroglio. Possibly appropriate. Galamatias. There's a word that comes to mind to describe what I may have wanted to express in response to some of the conclusions reached by the 'examiner'.

On the 2+ hour drive home I came to one conclusion. My hope, confidence and rest is in God alone. It is not in finances, it is not in physical events and health and, I wish to LOUDLY proclaim, it sure as heaven and hell is not in government, the IRS, bureaucracies, the UN or the lords of this world. None of those things put a hallelujah on my chorus.

So I recognize God, every so often in a timely fashion, has to challenge the foundations of my hope and confidence to make sure that my house is being built on a rock. On Him. I will always praise Him because He alone is my hope.

Is There Anything Worth Everything?

Some thoughts as I sit in the parking lot of the Federal Building in Boise awaiting my opportunity for God to show Himself strong on my behalf!!

Jesus constantly encouraged His followers with this challenge of discipleship: Is it the most important thing in your life? If it isn’t, you won’t be successful in the endeavor. Not because He won’t let us, but because it can’t be done any other way. But, how do we know what is important to us and what is not. What is most important to us and what is of little importance to us?

What would you give your life for? What would you give your life up to? Would you give your life for pleasure? Would you give your life up to fulfilling your desires? Would that be a noble endeavor?

Would you give your life for truth? Would you give your life for freedom?

Is there anything in your life that is worth giving your life for?

Would you give your life for the pursuit of happiness? Even the best moralists know that we need to find something in life more important to us than being happy.

Would I give my life to learning how to be a fully formed human being if it was the path by which my ultimate purpose is fulfilled: To glorify God and serve Him forever? Would that be a noble endeavor? Would I give the rest of this life (whatever is left) to this one task of learning how to be the fully formed human being my creator intended in order that He might trust me with His power in living a life that will never end?

What did He find worth giving His life for?

What would you give your life for?

The Veritas Forum

At the Veritas Forum at Columbia University in 2006, Alistair McGrath discussed with atheist David Helfand the issue of the meaning of life and the topic of Dawkin’s book: Is God a Delusion? Alistair McGrath, a writer whose must read book, ‘In the Beginning’ about the development of the King James Bible is positing the position that science points more arguably to the truth of God than to God as a delusion.

In the argument Mr. McGrath makes an interesting observation about the position of the reformation. “The reformation corresponds very well to what Thomas Kuhn would describe as a radical paradigm shift. And the key thing about Protestantism is it proposes not simply one such reforming event in the past, but an ongoing process of constant reevaluation and revision to try to ascertain that we have the best possible handle on our knowledge of God, and we want a sort of biblical anchor for that.” (emphasis mine)

If Mr. McGrath who is a brilliant intellectual follower of Christ is right in his characterization of the reformation movement then we must embrace and encourage those who challenge, question and present a new perspective that cause us to think, ponder, study and pray. I, for one, do want the best possible handle on my knowledge of God with a biblical anchor.

Let’s not be afraid to think new thoughts and challenge old ones, holding up everything to the ‘light of the knowledge of the Glory of God as seen in the face of Christ’.

Note: This quote by McGrath comes from a book entitled: A Place for Truth, Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions, published by InterVarsity. It is a compilation of talks at the Veritas Forum. Since it’s founding at Harvard in 1992, this forum has provided a place for leading thinkers to explore life’s most challenging and deepest questions of truth and life. A place to consider a serious dialogue without fear of reproach. I have personally followed the discussions for years and recommend them to anyone who is up for a challenge.