Kindle Notes & Highlights
but growing up in church taught me that a Christian was defined by what he or she didn’t do.
And maybe that’s the problem--I was trying to convince them that Christianity was right, not that Christ is beautiful or good.
But more than just wanting to look like we’ve been Photoshopped, it’s actually about what I don’t want. I don’t want to do the work.
We were made for the tension, for the challenges, the journey––not just the destination.
The life of faith is not a five- or eight-step plan, it’s a journey.
This is not Jesus making her life more convenient like when I pray for a good parking space when I’m running late. This is a promise that she will never have to return to this place of shame.
This story is not a model for evangelism. The Gospels––and indeed the whole Gospel narrative–– cannot be reduced to a model or programme. It is instead a glimpse of the heart of God, a glimpse of ourselves and a glimpse of life.
We are the one broken, the one with places of shame, the one with wounds to hide and fear of exposure.
If we are truly to figure out what it means to follow Jesus, we must stop defining our lives by what we don’t do and stop trying to follow an example we haven’t encountered. If we are going to recover, we need to rediscover. Rediscover the heart of God. Rediscover the words and life of Jesus. Rediscover and even redefine what it means to be a Christian in our culture, our community, our world.
What they saw as a blessing and a joy––their master’s investment and faith in them––this third servant has called a burden, a test and an obligation.
The easy way raises up Christians who are so afraid of being corrupted that their life cannot be contagious, who want the letter of the Law rather than the Law written on their hearts, who want to read the small print and ensure that they benefit from it before they commit to the life of faith.
‘What does the way I live out my faith say about who I believe God to be?’
"Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if nessecary." - St. Francis of Assisi
The promise that it’s easy sets people up for a fall because, in my experience, following Jesus is hard, messy and confusing––and never claims to be anything else.
The sermons we preach about God’s provision are destructive when they lead us to paradoxical conclusions about the character of God and our experience of life.
The small print of following Jesus is tough. It promises that you won’t have all the answers. It promises that things will be hard. It promises that tragedies will happen. It promises confusion, bewilderment and frustration. It promises dark nights of the soul and dark days. But where else would we go? Only Jesus has the words of life.
The truth that they just want my presence reminds me that sometimes I don’t know how to be present as myself
I love Mike Yaconelli’s observation that if you ask a group of adults if they can draw or dance or sing, they’ll answer based on what they consider proficiency in each area and whether or not they match up to the standard. But if you ask a group of children, most of them will shout ‘Yes!’ because they haven’t yet been beaten down into believing that to dance or draw or sing, you need to be good at it.
Wrestling with God and what it means to follow Him is hardwired into the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The issue of faith today is no longer one of scientific truth, it is one of beauty, love and goodness.
If we are to have ‘faith like children,’ we must approach the Bible differently, no longer counting the bones to see if we have the numbers right but searching for truth that changes us in the blood and guts: the tension and the challenge of the Story itself.
Not adults looking to be proven right but children searching for what is right.
Her faith formula brings her healing, but it is her encounter that brings her peace.
Thomas’s response is beautiful because it denies truth in favour of love for the sake of his heart.
Thomas did not have too little faith to believe. He had too much love for belief to be taken lightly.
Belief is cheap; love is expensive. Belief can happen without love; love can make belief difficult. Belief asks us to take an intellectual stand on one side or another; love requires us to actually stand there.
Belief can happen without love; love can make belief difficult. Belief asks us to take an intellectual stand on one side or another; love requires us to actually stand there.
You are upset because you played a happy song and I didn’t dance. You complain because you sing a sad song and I did not cry. You’re angry because you painted a picture of me and I look nothing like it.
Parables are not answers, they are deeper and better questions.
Jesus is not telling a story about a right place and a wrong place, He is giving us a spectrum upon which we all find ourselves in the mess we make of trying to follow Jesus. He is not telling a story of insiders and outsiders, of right people and wrong people, but is revealing to them and to us the complexity of the Christian journey. That we are not where we think we are.
I am none of these terms completely, and yet all of them partially.
I was told that God celebrated my creativity and exuberance––but I was supposed to be quiet during the service. I was told that God accepted me just as I am––but I needed to dress smart to come to church. I was taught that God forgave all my sins––but His followers seemed to have the memory of a herd of elephants.
church. I was taught that God forgave all my sins––but His followers seemed to have the memory of a herd of elephants.
I was suddenly confronted with a God who could be known rather than just known about, a God who could be experienced.
So often I have seen my Christian life driven by a need to earn love, to be celebrated for my undying loyalty and my exhaustion from giving my life for Jesus. So often I live like God’s love, affection and acceptance can be earned from the number of people I have preached to, the amount of ‘lost reached’ and the quantity of tears shed––but I find it doesn’t change how God sees me, my position before Him or, more often, my position in relation to everyone else before Him.
I seek life in wildness, excitement and rebellion, in everything that shimmers and shines. I seek life in things that will provide temporary escape but ultimately destroy it completely. I come home to work, rather than to live. I spend too much of myself in His fields and too little at His feet. I mistakenly believe that I––and perhaps we––need to earn what I already have, robbing God of what He truly wants but will not forcefully take: my presence, my heart.
that I belong with and to God, that He not only loves me but also likes me, that He doesn’t want me for what I can do but for who I am.
The biggest battle of my Christian life has been feeling at home with God. Intimacy with God was a foreign concept to me, reserved for saints, politicians and televangelists. For me growing up, God always felt like the old man in the sky with a stick. Unmerciful, unflinching, unsmiling, He looked down on the world––and me in particular––without emotion or fondness, his eyes unreadable and uncertain. Prayer felt to me like sitting outside the principal’s office when I was in school, trying to figure out how to get away with my wrongdoing, and church felt like being at a fancy dinner and not
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I decided just to put my head down, colour within the lines and hold out for Heaven where I would finally be transformed into the sort of person that could satisfy His unreasonable and unachievable standards.
I know that Sunday School teachers have the best of intentions, but I wonder if we are told stories as children that we have no business hearing until we have the intellectual capacity to hear them.
But he has already given everything––yet God asks for what he has left.
“God told me to: Either God is evil or you’re insane. Take your pick.”
It’s not simply an issue of whether or not God can trust Abraham, it’s Abraham’s opportunity to discover that he can trust God, that he will not be subject to the cruel, insatiable hearts of other gods. This God is good.
Whether he passes or fails God’s test, what’s crucial is that this is God showing that He is not bloodthirsty, He is not insatiable, that His heart is good. That He can be trusted with our lives, our loves and our dreams.
I had a lecturer in Bible college who once told us that she questions the authenticity of anyone’s faith if they haven’t sworn in the face of God.
‘If you don’t tell God exactly how you feel in the words that you feel it, then you rob Him of the thing that he wants the most. Your heart.’
‘Before you could speak my message, you had to feel what it is like to be me. To love passionately, giving absolutely of yourself only to have this love spurned, to have your lover walk away not only from your love but into the arms of everything that will destroy her. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Go and win her back. I don’t care what it takes, what it costs. You do whatever it takes to bring her home because this is what I am going to do for my people.’
That he will do whatever it takes to rescue us, to free us from that which would destroy us or own us.
I didn’t just need a new view of the heart of God, but an insight to how God sees me and my life.
Before morality, before works, before calling, everything flows from the ever-growing experience of being at home with Him.
Sin is the external expression of an inner truth. Sin is not simply an action but instead a reaction to what we believe at the deepest levels of our selves.
