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We’re not called to live lives of detached spirituality or serial do-goodery. 

We’re called into the life of Jesus. 

What does that look like, you ask? Sometimes pictures do more than words.

Lately I’ve been troubled by the misuse of the Bible, and perhaps more deeply the complete misunderstanding of its aim, purpose, and the conditions and opportunities from which it arose. 

So this morning, while reading through today’s lectionary reading, I was looking at a small part of Hebrews and became overwhelmed by the amount of ways the passage could be abused if it wasn’t approached from a proper perspective.

And then it hit me, at a disconcerting but hopeful level, that I’m not always right. That I don’t always have the “perfect” perspective. And even if I did, there’s no way to get even a handful of people to see everything the way I see it, much less a lot of people. So where’s the hope?

Where’s the hope in that? 

Here’s what occurred to me:

At the heart of every moment of Scripture, from small to large, is the condition of the human heart. 

Now, you could make the argument that God is at the heart of every moment of Scripture, or Jesus, or something a little more holy. But all I mean is that the transformation Scripture is constantly beckoning and pointing to is primarily a matter of the renovation of the heart. 

So I think we mistakenly go to Scripture to quickly, both personally and communally (I’m thinking about the sermon here) with “what does God want me to do?”.

But perhaps we should be more content asking “who does God want me to be?”.

It’s an incomplete answer, but I find hope in it. 

Let’s start there.

the conquering of the evil within: a transformed heart/life/world

Over the years, I’ve wrestled with what I believe to be a shallow understanding of sin, repentance, and forgiveness.

For a lot of us, those words are inherent with religious meaning that we don’t have to think twice about…

Sin means I’ve done something wrong and God’s not happy with me.
Repentance means I should stop doing that something wrong and feel really, really bad about it.
Forgiveness means that even though I did something wrong, it’s ok because Jesus still loves me and he’ll love me even more if I stop doing that something wrong.

This, above, is what I’m talking about. Even as I typed it, I cringed. It feels/felt so self-focused, so rudimentary, so.. inaccessible. 

Seems contradictory, at first, that something that’s been grossly simplified could also be inaccessible. However, I feel that when something is stripped of it’s depth and taken out of any broader vision of life that it loses its power.

It’s not accessible simply because everyone can repeat it. It’s very inaccessible because, often, we’re not sure what to actually do with it.

It’s not accessible to a lived existence. 

N.T. Wright addresses this issue well in the last few moments of “Simply Jesus:”

…in Luke’s gospel, the risen Jesus tells his followers to go and announce to the world that a new way of life has been opened, the way of “repentance” and “forgiveness” (24:47). To us Westerners, that sounds a bit gloomy, as though it’s a perpetual act of contrition, dredging up our “sins” in order to hear someone declare them forgiven (until next time!). But it’s far, far bigger than that. The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We’ve been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope. It’s a way nobody’s ever tried before, a way that is unthinkable to most human beings and societies as—well, as resurrection itself.” Precisely. That’s the point. Welcome to Jesus’s new world.

Welcome to Jesus’s new world. 

When we reduce the concepts of sin, forgiveness, and repentance down to absolving us of personal guilt for moral wrongdoings, we miss the fact that embedded within this language is the larger picture of healing and restoration that God is ushering into the world. 

The evil within the hearts of men and women and creation itself is much deeper than social vices, though they are included in this picture of what’s drastically ailing the Creation. We aren’t simply trapped by sinful practices—we’re walking in a defeated, broken, damaging cycle of hopelessness. We are, daily, transformed more and more by an image of hope that will always fail us.

Always.

And so Jesus offers something greater. A transformed heart, a new way of life, as a part of the new Creation-world he is inaugurating. 

Forgiveness and repentance are not simply absolution language. They are reconciliation language!

It’s not simply that we are awful, rotten and bad but God will forgive us for being bad if we say the magic words.

It’s that we were created for the Glory of God, for a way of life, and yet we chose another way of life—a life glorifying ourselves. But Jesus offers a chance to be reconciled to our original purpose! He, through his death and resurrection, sets us free from the endless, defeated cycle of self-glorifying-pursuits-that-end-in-failure.

He transforms us. Our hearts. Our lives. He sets us on a new path to walk (to live!) for something greater than ourselves—the God who lovingly called us all into existence.

Ideashare: How to Have a Missional Meal

This past Sunday night, we hosted a really fun event called “How to Have a Missional Meal.” Full disclosure, it was based on some of the concepts in Tim Chester’s A Meal With Jesus and a few videos from the Verge Network. 

It was a 90 minute event that included a meal, teaching, conversation, dessert, and a challenge to leave and make a difference (including a gift to send people on their way a little more “equipped”). The teaching and conversation bits were short and continuously switching to keep the night moving—none of the teaching elements were more than 7-8 minutes long. 

Here’s a quote from the intro that explains what we were going for: