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April 13 - May 10, 2024
presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.
Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not. What we have to believe or do now, by contrast, is real life, bursting with interesting, frightening and relevant things and people.
What we have to deal with
Jesus and his words have never belonged to the categories of dogma or law, and to read them as if they did is simply to miss them.
He himself described his words as “spirit and life” (John 6:63). They invade our “real” world with a reality even more real than it
which explains why human beings then and now have to protect themselves against them.
The early message was, accordingly, not experienced as something its hearers had to believe or do because otherwise something bad—something with no essential connection with real life—would happen to them. The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.
It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why, today, we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best.
We lead them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and leave them there, devoting our remaining efforts to “attracting” them to this or that.
it lies much deeper than anything we might appropriately feel guilty about. For it is not, truly, a matter of anything
we do or don’t do. It is a matter of how we cannot but think and act, given the context of our mental and spiritual formation.
any significant change can come only by breaking the stranglehold of the ideas and concepts that automatically shunt aside Jesus, “the Prince of Life,” when ques...
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obedience is regarded as just out of the question or impossible. This is largely because obedience is thought of solely in terms of law—which we shall have much to say about in what follows.
the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.
The Bible is, after all, God’s gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars.
In Search of Guidance,
The Spirit of the Disciplines,
P. T. Forsyth, C. S. Lewis, Frank Laubach, E. Stanley Jones, and George MacDonald,
Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Thomas, Luther, and Calvin—
ENTERING THE ETERNAL KIND OF LIFE NOW
God’s care for humanity was so great that he sent his unique Son among us, so that those who count on him might not lead a futile and failing existence, but have the undying life of God Himself. JOHN 3:16
Jesus’ good news, then, was that the Kingdom of God had come, and that he, Jesus, was its herald and expounder to men. More than that, in some special, mysterious way, he was the Kingdom. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE, JESUS: THE MAN WHO LIVES
“Secular humanism”
Seven men who rule the world from the grave
Paul Bourget wrote a novel, The Disciple.
practice.
Christian Faith in the Modern World
Absurdity reigns, and confusion makes it look good.
You have only to “stay tuned,” and you can arrive at a perpetual state of confusion and, ultimately, despair with no effort at all.
Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession
PBS series called A Glorious Accident.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
Nothing is more meaningful than beauty.
We have received an invitation. We are invited to make a pilgrimage—into the heart and life of God.
No person or circumstance other than our own decision can keep us away. “Whosoever will may come.”
The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt. People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not.
In its deepest
nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.
The Way we speak of is Jesus, the “luminous Nazarene,” as Albert Einstein once called him.
Jesus offers himself as God’s doorway into the life that is truly life.
Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living.
It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life? If I had to choose, I would rather have a car that runs than good insurance on one that doesn’t. Can I not have both?
He comes where we are, and he brings us the life we hunger for. An early report reads, “Life was in him, life that made sense of human existence” (John 1:4).
F. W. Faber
All for Jesus
Our human life, it turns out, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone.
The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows. But the divine is not pushy.
Huston Smith
Beyond the post-modern mind
the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being.
We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.
Our hunger for significance is a signal of who we are and why we are here, and it also is the basis of humanity’s enduring response to Jesus. For he always takes individual human beings as seriously as their shredded dignity demands, and he has the resources to carry through with his high estimate of them.
“Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand” (3:2; 4:17; 10:7). This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God’s eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life.
“Now Simon,” Jesus asked, “which one will love the man most?” Simon replied that it would be the one who had owed most.
“Loved me much!” Simply that, and not the customary proprieties, was now the key of entry into the rule of God.
