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July 24 - July 24, 2018
Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity.
Can we seriously believe that God would establish a plan for us that essentially bypasses the awesome needs of present human life and leaves human character untouched? Would he leave us even temporarily marooned with no help in our kind of world, with our kinds of problems: psychological, emotional, social, and global?
History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects.
When we examine the broad spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice, we see that the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individual’s sins. On the left it is removal of social or structural evils.
To the right, being a Christian is a matter of having your sins forgiven.
To the left, you are Christian if you have a significant commitment to the elimination of social evils. A Christian is either one who is ready to die and face the judgment of God or one who has an identifiable commitment to love and justice in society. That’s it.
To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.
“the gospel” is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed.
We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.
we must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us—through gritted teeth—as “Christian” love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his
When Paul on Mars Hill told his Greek inquisitors that in God we “live and move and exist,” he was expressing in the most literal way possible the fact learned from the experience of God’s covenant people, the Jews. He was not speaking metaphorically or abstractly.
“growing up” is largely a matter of learning to hide our spirit behind our face, eyes, and language so that we can evade and manage others to achieve what we want and avoid what we fear.
God relates to space as we do to our body.
God wishes to be seen, and he wishes to be sought, and he wishes to be expected, and he wishes to be trusted.
We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one.
The idea of an all-encompassing, all-penetrating world of God, interactive at every point with our lives, where we can always be totally at home and safe regardless of what happens in the visible dimension of the universe, is routinely treated as ridiculous.
nothing fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and the human self since the time of Jesus.30
Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent. We cannot pray for his help and rely on his collaboration in dealing with real-life matters we suspect might defeat his knowledge or abilities. And can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed? Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what we take him to be
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“Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.” Or, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.”
The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty.
Those poor in spirit are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.
If Jesus’ aim here is to tell us how to qualify for kingdom life, must we not believe he gave us a complete list? If that were his aim, would he have failed to mention other possible ways of attaining the kingdom?
Draw any cultural or social line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it.
the kingdom of the heavens has a chemistry that can transform even the past and make the terrible, irretrievable losses that human beings experience seem insignificant in the greatness of God. He restores our soul and fills us with the goodness of rightness.
The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about
For all their necessity, goodness, and beauty, laws that deal only with actions, such as the Ten Commandments, simply cannot reach the human heart, the source of actions.
the mere fact that you do not commit adultery with a certain man or woman does not mean that your relation to that person in the domain of sexuality is as it should be or that you yourself are what you ought to be with reference to your sexuality.
Yet intimacy is a spiritual hunger of the human soul, and we cannot escape it. This has always been true and remains true today. We now keep hammering the sex button in the hope that a little intimacy might finally dribble out.
But Jesus goes right to the heart of why people swear oaths. He knew that they do it to impress others with their sincerity and reliability and thus gain acceptance of what they are saying and what they want.
The essence of swearing or making oaths is to try to use something that, though impressive, is irrelevant to the issues at hand to get others to believe you and let you have your way. This is wrong. It is unlike God.
As anger feeds on anger, so patient goodness will normally deflate it.
A discipline is an activity in our power that we do to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort.
We must lovingly allow people to think whatever they will.
But our feathered friends do not seem to worry about the physical supports of their life, such as food and water and shelter. They simply seek it as they need it and take what they find. And that is how we should be.
Could we successfully negotiate personal relations without letting people know that we disapprove of them and find them to be in the wrong?
Most families would be healthier and happier if their members treated one another with the respect they would give to a perfect stranger.
We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to condemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that. I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so.
In shame we are self-condemned for being the person we are. It touches our identity and causes self-rejection. We feel ourselves to be a failure just for being the person we are. We wish to be someone else. But of course we cannot. We are trapped, and our life is made hopeless.
we cannot—surrender the valid practice of distinguishing and discerning how things are in order to avoid condemning others. We can, however, train ourselves to hold people responsible and discuss their failures with them—and even assign them penalties, if we are, for example, in some position over them—without attacking their worth as human beings or marking them as rejects.
What we are actually doing with our proper condemnations and our wonderful solutions, more often than not, is taking others out of their own responsibility and out of God’s hands and trying to bring them under our control.
we are always to respect other people as spiritual beings who are responsible before God alone for the course they choose to take of their own free will.
We should note that the ask-seek-knock teaching first applies to our approach to others, not to prayer to God.
When I ask someone to do or to be or to give something, I stand with that person in the domain of a constraint without force or necessitation. We are together. A request by its very nature unites. A demand, by contrast, immediately separates. It is this peculiar “atmosphere” of togetherness that characterizes the kingdom and is, indeed, what human beings were created to thrive in.
Prayer is, under any interpretation, a particular exertion and expression of thought, will, and desire.
Sometimes we must wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time.
To honor our parents means to be thankful for their existence and to respect their actual role as givers of life in the sequence of human existence.
Today we sometimes speak of people who cannot forgive themselves. Usually, however, the problem is much deeper. More often than not, these are people who refuse to live on the basis of pity.
We may not always have it ahead of time, but often right when we need it from the God who is right there with us.
“You, in the midst of your actual life there, are exactly the person God wanted.”
The apprentices of Jesus are primarily occupied with the positive good that can be done during their days “under the sun” and the positive strengths and virtues that they develop in themselves as they grow toward “the kingdom prepared for them from the foundations of the world” (Matt. 25:34).
