En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

by Chuck Ammons

The devil loves to get us to stop seeing faces and to reduce people down to stances we can categorize, talk about, and oppose.

We don’t establish the reality of heaven on earth by treating people like hell.

Over the history of Christendom, we’ve gathered a lot of groups, held a ton of services, and hosted mountains of conferences all about ‘cleaning the room’ here on earth as a ‘city on a hill that can’t be hidden.’ We’ve built impressive systems for studying the Bible, growing in influence, and walking in morality. We’ve written sermons, books, and songs about Kingdom Come that we’ve read and sung in a lot of languages. And that’s awesome. But unless it all amounts to more than mere talk, we will only find ourselves sitting in the same dirty room while we pat one another on the back for all of our virtue.

Love isn’t love until it actually does something about the brokenness in the place it resides.

For all of those lamenting how bad the world is getting, may I suggest to you that our greatest hindrance to revival isn’t all of the sin they’ve been holding, but the love that we’ve been hoarding? It is time for love to move beyond theological and theoretical platitudes to become a people of theocentric (God-centered) presence.

Agape love will never be experienced by the moral grenades we lob from a safe distance. It will require the radical yielding of our time, our talents, our treasures, and our touch in every place His Spirit is leading us.

We place great emphasis on ‘being bold enough’ to memorize proselytizing presentations apart from relationships. But here’s the deal: Jesus didn’t just blow through town to recite the Romans Road or to leave a tract on the urinal of your life. He bankrupted heaven to be born as a baby, to grow, and then to spend a lifetime on the slow road of presence. He patiently and painstakingly pursued you and me. And today, His Holy Spirit fills and guides us every moment.

We do not need more training strategies for how to share our faith. We just need to slow down enough to actually see people the way heaven sees them and to pursue them the way the Father pursues them.

We have this ironic tendency as humans to assign an evaluation to our life station that empowers our situation, ignores God’s revelation, and inherits frustration.

The Cross demands no more blood being shed to get your attention. If God requires punishment in order to teach obedience, then Calvary was insufficient.

We are not transformed by the brutality of threat, but by the beauty of the love revealed in Jesus Christ.