And when I say "Jesus", I really mean "Christians".
And when I say "gift to the world" I am really referring to the fact that we think we are.
And when I say everything else about what we have come to model our little lives after in hopes that this created picture of what we think holiness is will get us some type of benefit, I mean it.
And when I say I mean it, I mean I have observed it time and time again.
We are good at knocking down the doubters, the haters, the questioners, the sinners, the young, the different, the every other normal person who is so freaking tired of trying to live up tho this standard that only one Person ever attained. That one Person who was crucified on a trash heap between two common criminals. Yeah. Him.
But we are pretty bad about doing the one thing that Jesus modeled more than anything. We are pretty terrible at actually representing what we were told defines us and set us visibly apart from anyone else in this entire world. We kind've suck at ascertaining the intention of Jesus through the stories of Him, and we're pretty adept at picking the mechanics apart, and focusing on the external and skipping over the heart of what matters the most.
A washed up woman, divorced 5 times and sleeping around. A humiliated prostitute. A homeless, blind beggar. A rich young
To love people where they're at. Not fix them or correct them or parent them or appease them or condone. To discover what love really means, and to realize that it is very different than what Christian sub-culture says it is. To stop parroting answers that come from a textbook belief system that men have created and instituted, and to start seeking your own answers, and discover what God speaks to your heart when you finally lay it all down and are silent. To allow God's truth to penetrate every definition of every word you ever thought was so firmly defined. To let your life be turned upside down, and shaken out, and remolded and shaped into something that has not yet been created.
To learn how to love people. This is where the heart of Jesus stayed, and its from here our hearts have strayed. If we cannot love the person before we ever open our mouths to speak into their lives, we are not emulating Jesus. We are emulating what most people know as the church. It's time we take back the definitive characteristic that we never should have traded in for rules and guidelines and power points of steps and methods to being better Christians.
We've got to learn to love
thank you for allowing this thought. sometimes i feel so far away from being who he wants/ has made me to be.
ReplyDeleteliving out what we are given is so different than what we've actually been doing. bleh