3. Climb a 14,000′ Mountain. Need to start planning for this. Want to go?
4. Visit somewhere I’ve never been. Considering going to Florida for the Exponential Conference. Any donated airline miles can be considered helping towards my kingdom goals.
5. Find a full-time job. Actually have an interview this week. Please keep praying!
6. Take at least one graduate course. Yeah…must complete 5 to do 6….
7. Read 40 books. Lost some speed here as well, but check out reviews for 7 and 8 soon!
8. Volunteer at least 1 time a month. Got the chance to help out at the Verge Conference. Directed parking, then went inside to learn.
9. Pay off all debt, except school loans. Looks like I’ll knock out the credit card with my upcoming tax return. Pretty excited about that.
10. Share my faith regularly. Had a co-worker approach me recently about this. Looking forward to sharing.
11. Begin leading and/or hosting a regular gathering for skeptics and Christians to study the Bible. Still working on making the apartment the kind of place one might invite others too. Need something for people to sit on.
12. Write daily, including journaling, blogging and working on a book. Really gotten off track on this one. The move has killed my rhythm, and writing suffered greatly. Hope this will pick up soon.
Knowing what we know about the water we swim in, we have to get our minds around a series of unpopular facts:
1. We do not live in a Christian nation. We never have. In fact, a good argument could be made that the idea of a Christian Nation is idolatrous, and counter to Jesus teachings about the Kingdom.
2. This means we have no rights. Culture teaches us that we have a bill of rights and human rights. Jesus teaches us that we will be persecuted. He calls this “blessed.”
3. Jesus does not promise us life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. He pursued his Father, lost his liberty and sacrificed his life. American Dreams that anyone can and should gain financial success cannot be found in the Sermon on the Mount or any of Jesus other teachings.
4. Having no rights, means you have no right to force your ideals on others. When you resort to using coercion or politics to make others behave, you have given up on God’s power to change people and the Church’s role as witnesses to another kingdom.
5. With no rights, no coercion, no politics, and no ambition for riches, you will be banished to the margins.
As followers of Jesus Way, along with God’s people since the time of Abraham, are Underdogs. We are scrawny, poor, and hopelessly outnumbered. Strangers in a strange land. We have no home field advantage.
We fight with weapons that are not of this world. We count our victories in lives changed and communities shifted. We will not see victory in this world.
This is where the adventure of following Jesus begins.
Jesus’s audience were first century Jews. They survived off subsistence farming, building with wood and catching fish. They woke up with the sun, worked while it was day, spent evenings and Sabbaths with friends and family. They lived in villages with a few hundred people and arranged marriages for their 12 year old children.
They were part of a diaspora with a rich history of laws and prophets. They shunned non-Jews and heretics. They were suffering under a foreign pagan government who oppressed them, and pagan social institutions were that undermining their worldview. Jesus teachings, miracles, life and death addressed the wants, needs and cultural artifacts of his audience.
After Jesus death, the audience quickly changes. Representatives of the entire Roman Empire hear the message in their own language at Pentecost. The majority of the New Testament, the writings of Luke and Paul, are tasked with re-presenting Jesus to the broader Roman culture.
Often people simplify Jesus teachings to only deal with heart issues. Though there are repercussions for the individual, statements about murder and adultery in the Sermon on the Mount are scathing reviews of a fallen culture. Cultural norms allow for hatred and lust to rule one’s life, as long as technical laws aren’t broken.
As Paul shares the truth about Jesus, he is constantly co-opting language of the Roman Empire, showing that Jesus is the true power that Caesar pretends to be. Much of his life and writings are focused on destroying Jewish racism and idolatrous Roman nationalism, and inviting all people into Jesus’s Way.
A necessary, but often ignored step in developing a Jesus Way of Life is studying the water where we swim. Studying the Bible to learn what to think may not penetrate a cultural lifestyle in which sin is normal.
This is why from the beginning God’s people have been nomads, wanderers, and refugees. A Jesus Way may often mean swimming upstream; knowing and paddling against the water we find ourselves in.
At some point, probably around the time of the Enlightenment, churches became convinced that what you think shapes what you do. The way to lead people to be like Christ became teaching them what to think.
Churches organized to become educational institutions. Sunday mornings (and nights) centered around didactic three (or more) point sermons, along with classes on Sunday morning and Sunday night, workshops, seminars and retreats, all teaching people how to think right.
In the 80s and 90s there was a big push to be more creative, entertaining and relevant in presenting how to think. In the past decade, much was made of creating space in the church to have more space for discussion — discussing what to think.
Thinking is an incredibly important part of being human. Our ability to reason sets us apart from the animals. Who really wants to throw away our advances in medicine and technology and go back to a pre-Enlightenment world? But we make a huge mistake in assuming that thinking alone is the sole force in shaping a person’s life.
The earliest name for Christ’s Church was “The Way.” The early the people of God were not a group that just knew what to think, but a community with a way of life, shaped to look like Jesus, the Way, The Truth and the Life.
The next few posts will explore what would it mean to recapture a peculiarly Christian way of life.
If you’d known me before I started training for my marathon, you would have laughed at the idea. My only memory as a child of playing any sports was sitting down on a soccer field, while the rest of my team chased the ball. I have never been mistaken for “athletic.”
This is why you MUST run a marathon. For me, or at least, pre-marathon me, an accomplishment like this would have been impossible. I’m not saying “you can do anything if you just put your mind to it!” But I have come to believe that life isn’t worth living if you are not aiming at incredible, meaningful accomplishments; goals that are out of reach of the person you are today.
If you read this blog, I hope my story will encourage you to set BHAGs and accomplish them.
For my single friends, what if you stopped focusing on things like getting your career off the ground and finding the perfect someone, and set a goal like rebuilding a village in Haiti or writing that book you have in you.
For those who are parents, what if you set the goal of being so involved in your children’s life and schooling that every single student in your community graduates.
For those who are retirees, what if you decided to devote your time and energy into coaching young couples in marriage, and personally destroying our nations 50% divorce rate.
What is impossible for you? Why aren’t you doing it?
