Making people feel hopeless is not the prophetic anointing in either Old or New Covenants. God’s rebuke always contains hope for a different future for those who respond to God’s outstretched call to return.

~ Stephen Crosby in Healing: Hope or Hype?

As many Christians are becoming more vocal about the shortcomings of the institutional church, it is important that those voices also carry a constructive element as well.  If we become too stuck on seeing shortcomings and faults (which everyone has, no matter how correct one’s theology is), it is easy to become entangled in bitterness and tearing others down.

This is a dangerous place to be and is not the heart of God.

Only correcting someone does not provide them with a reason to change.  It is the hope beyond, the hope of something better that causes people to change and embrace a different paradigm.

And what is this hope?

It is not a system, a set of beliefs, or allegiance to a denomination, movement, or celebrity personality.

Our hope is simply Christ in us.

God decided to let his people know this rich and glorious secret which he has for all people. This secret is Christ himself, who is in you. He is our only hope for glory.  (Colossians 1:27)

May we also remember that the spirit of prophecy is to reveal Jesus Christ (Revelation 19:10).

The Lord and His body reveal both deviations from Christ, but also the path toward Him.

Build hope, and…

Follow the Life!

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Note: For some reason, I was not receiving updates to approve comments on posts.  If you have left a comment in the last couple of weeks it should now be showing under that post.

Now let me add one last word here that willhelp you in loving Jesus – doing things for God is not the same thing as loving God.

Jesus loved the poor – so, movements have arisen that make service to the poor the main thing.  Even though Jesus never said that being poor was more noble or even spiritual.  The lastest craze is justice – so we rush off to the corners of the globe to fight for justice… and often leave Jesus behind.  We actually come to think that service for Jesus is friendship with him.  That’s like a friend who washes your car and cleans your house but never goes anywhere with you – never comes to dinner, never wants to take a walk.  But they’re a “faithful” friend.  Though you never talk.

How many children have said, “My dad worked hard to provide for us – but all I ever really wanted was his love?”

This is – yet again – one more cunning ploy of the religious to keep us from the kind of intimacy with Jesus that will heal our lives.  And change the world.  We are not meant to merely love his teaching, or his morals, or his kindness or his social reforms.  We are meant to love the man himself, know him intimately; keep this as the first and foremost practice of our lives.  It is a fact that people most devoted to the work of the Lord actually spend the least amount of time with him.  First things first.  Love Jesus.

~ John Eldredge in Beautiful Outlaw

It’s easy to get caught up in doing activities for the Lord and miss the Person.  Even good activities.  This can happen in any relationship that loses the personal, relational aspect.

I imagine that if Jesus sat me down at the end of the year to review my “performance” (like they do where I work), He is going to be more concerned with whether or not I opened myself up to knowing Him more as a Person rather than how many “things” I accomplished for Him.

Not that we don’t want to accomplish things for the Lord, but when we set knowing Him intimately as our first priority, it is Him who leads us into the “things” He would have us do.  True divine activity in the world today is that which is initiated out from a vibrant relationship with Jesus.

The Apostle Paul counted all things as garbage compared to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:8).

Last month I and the folks at the 3rd Race blog all wrote about ways to create time with Jesus.

Some ideas for new ways to eat and drink the Lord:

1. A Walk with God
2. New Experiences With the Lord
3. Date With the All in All
4. Locked in a Box
5. Creating with the Creator
6. Tell Me About It
7. Seeing Christ in the Courtyard
8. Your Favorite Meals

Follow the Life!

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So much of what has caused mankind to stumble through the ages is that we have inappropriately placed ourselves at the center of life where God Himself desires to reside and function.

The following quote gets to the heart of this problem:

In this fallen way of life, people and things have worth only to the extent that they fill us.  Instead of simply ascribing unsurpassable worth to others because the Creator does, we ascribe limited worth to people depending on our judgment of them.  Do these people love me?  Do they please me?  Do they benefit me?  Do they affirm me?  Do they agree with my opinions?  We are the ones who declare that someone or something is good or evil, for we have set ourselves up as the center around which everything revolves, and therefore, the standard against which everything is measured.  “For man in the state of disunion,” Bonhoeffer says, “good consists in passing judgment, and the ultimate criterion is man himself.  Knowing good an evil, man is essentially judge.”

Every judgment we think, speak, or act upon presupposes that we are in a position of superiority over the person we judge.   It presupposes that we are “god” relative to the person or thing we judge.  The judgment is illegitimate because in reality we are not god to anyone.  We are not the center of anyone’s life.  Furthermore, the judgement is inaacurrate because in reality we are not wise like God.  We cannot know what God knows.  And the judgement is invariably self-serving, for we are using it to fill the God-shaped vacuum in our lives.

Our judgement cuts us off from our true source of life, and the person we judge becomes a source of life for us.  Our condemnation of that person, whether it be about a major lifestyle issue or a minor matter of appearance, gives us a momentary feeling of worth, of superiority, of fullness – of deity.  Though we are in fact empty, we can, at least in our own minds, stand over someone for a moment.  Though we ourselves are sinners, we can, at least for a moment, drink from the well of believing that at least we are not “like that person.”  However bad we may fell about ourselves, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has something to feed us, at least for the moment.

If we are to live the life God intends for us, if we are to participate in the ecstatic love of the triune God, God must be restored as the center of our lives.  We must die to ourselves as center, die to our addiction to idols, and die to the perpetual judgments we entertain in our minds.  God can only be our source of life when he is the center of our lives.  So long as we thrust ourselves into the center, we will be forced to seek life from idols, juding good and evil, and thus be cut off from our source center.  We will live a life that is actually death.  The only way to discover true life is to die to the “life” of living as the center and be restored ot our true source center (Matt. 10:39; 16:25; cf. Gal. 2:19-20).

~ Greg Boyd in Repenting of Religion

Well, that’s something to think about this week…

Questions for discussion:

~ What part of this quote stands out the most to you?

~ What does this mean to you in practical daily life?

Follow the Life!