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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jon Tyson
Read between
February 27 - April 2, 2022
Speaker and author Frank Viola noted,
In Genesis 1 and 2, the Bible opens up with a woman and a man. In Revelation 21 and 22, the Bible closes with a woman and a man. The Bible opens up with a wedding, and it ends with a wedding. It opens with a marriage and it ends with a marriage…. Your Bible is essentially a love story.3
God’s presence among his people has always been his heart. God’s vision was not a building to belong in but a people to walk among.
And his presence is no longer found on Sinai or Zion but in ordinary people like us.
The body of Christ exists to express God in the earth.
Lord, bring your body to life. May it express your heart and passion in a way that reveals the splendor of your salvation to the world.
Jesus wants his followers to care about justice and holiness, orphans and widows, and being unpolluted by the world (James 1:27).
Why are idols so deadly? Because they deceive, distort, and destroy. Heart idols distort our lives. Cultural idols distort our world.
FASTING
Eliminate, assimilate, dominate, and demonize.
For thirty minutes, in a taxi in New York, the other became a brother; a stranger, a friend.
The Greek word for “grumbling” means “a secret displeasure not openly avowed.”
“He who speaks evil of an absent man or woman is not welcome at this table.”
The practice of hospitality is normally understood as a privilege extended to others, but the biblical writers believed that hospitality offers a promise and gift to those who extend it.
What will happen to us if we refuse the stranger? If we rely on cultural lenses rather than biblical ones, we may be shutting God
out of our lives.
Around a table on a college campus, a Jew and a white supremacist encountered a portal of possibility. An environment of welcome transformed Derek’s identity, and he found a new way forward.
Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen said this decades ago (and it’s more true now than ever): “Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy to suddenly appear, intrude and do harm. But still—that is our vocation: to convert…the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.”23 To create a free and fearless space—this is our vocation. Hospitality must
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The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. JAMES BALDWIN, Giovanni’s Room
Whenever we are sure that we are among the righteous, we immediately find ourselves among the arrogant.
The toxic power of contempt lies in its devaluation of others. “Contempt is itself the claim to relative superiority.”
After deconstructing the religious, racial, and gender hierarchies, Jesus made this claim through the apostle Paul: “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:26–29). In synagogue liturgy, Jewish men prayed this prayer: “Thank you, Lord, that I’m not a woman. Thank you
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that was upholding harmful hierarchies. By affirming that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, one could no longer say these prayers in the synagogue. They were forced to come to terms with the redirection of Christ.9
How would things change if you resolved to rebel against your own indifference and embody the things you long to see in the world? If you resolved that you would pursue beauty and resist brokenness? That you would resist idolatry with worship, exhaustion with rest, apathy with hunger, fear with hospitality, contempt with honor, hate with love, privilege with sacrifice, and cynicism with celebration? If your life became a parable of what happens when someone lives with integrity and in community no matter the cost?
