What if we gave up and started living lives of joy in Christ? What kind of revolution would it cause? What kind of things would be done?
What if we stopped running from committee to committee and started to work in the world? What if we stopped debating the best way to bring people to the church and just walked down the street saying hello to our neighbors? What if we stopped agonizing over how much money we needed to bring in to meet operating expenses and actually followed Jesus' teachings regarding selling all we have for the poor? What if we spent less time nitpicking the meaning of the smallest word and more time living in the Spirit of all the Word?
What if we remembered the Gospel every moment of our lives? What if Jesus occupied a prominent place in our hearts and minds, even while we wait in line at the grocery store, even while we interact with our insufferable co-worker, even while we ride the bus? What if the Gospel implicated all of our actions and choices? What if we devoted less lip-service to Jesus and to our churches and gave ourselves over to acting in Christ? How much louder would those actions be than our words?
What if the Bible brought us joy? What if we didn't slog through its pages in an attempt to get through our assignment and move on to real life? What if the Bible was our real life? What if we tried to really and truly understand it instead of flippantly declaring the words on the surface as all there is*? What if we decided to spend our lives living with and wrestling with the Bible in the knowledge that true understanding was an impossible goal to be made for a single lifetime? What if we recognized this and decided not to care and saw the Bible not as a dried-up set of riles but as the Living Word, always changing and showing us different things based on where we were in our lives?
What if we decided to stop calling ourselves Christians and start acting like Christians? What if we lived our lives in the joy of being Christ's followers instead of the drudgery of serving a judgmental, vengeful God who was waiting for us to mess up?
Just a thought.
*I'm really bothered by the use of the Bible as some sort of straightforward handbook, like it's a car-repair manual or the instructions that come with a DVD player. I don't think the Bible is meant to be read like a series of directions which, if followed, will guarantee a certain outcome. I see it more like one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books--a little convoluted, every passage leading off to others which lead to others which lead back to the first passage.
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1 comment:
At the heart of Christianity, and it's easy to miss, is Christ calling each of us to put down our fishing nets and follow him. I know a lot of Christians who really get that. Let's hope that as we individually follow Christ and are transformed by him, others will see the difference between participating in a ritual vs. living a new life.
BTW, I like what you say about the Bible not being a book of directions. More than anything, it's a story of how God has revealed himself in the world through the lives of ordinary people. It has more depth and insight into life than I'll ever be able to understand.
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