Christianity over the past 2000 years has moved from a tribe of renegades to a religion of conformists… Jesus is being lost in a religion bearing his name. People are being lost because they cannot reconcile Jesus’ association with Christianity. Christianity has become docile, domesticated, civilized.”
-erwin McManus
When I think about Jesus, or Paul, or Simon Peter I picture like an Indiana Jones character trotting the ancient world making politicians look like doofuses, rich people and their roman coins utterly useless, and the rest of society admire their mysterious gusto enough to follow them around like groupies or paparazzi, US weekly style. How far have Christ followers drifted from this movement 2000 years later?
The modern religious conformist makes me sick, maybe because sometimes I feel myself slipping into that ra-tard sloth pattern of a comatose Christian sometimes. UGH. We do live in a different world but everyday can be just as much as a mission trip as Paul getting ship wrecked in the mediterranean in the early AD days. People are tripping around this place all around us in a desperate cloud of self remedy for the gaping hole in their soul for sOMEthing, anything, to suffice and carry them into the next day or week. They don’t know what they are missing if they haven’t experienced it.
BUT maybe YOU have. I know I have and yet I am often too scared to offend someone, or immediately get written off as one of those marshmallow Christians who dramatically coughs when someone lights a stog, or is desperate to hunt down a husband and have sheltered home-schooled kids, or wince at a four letter word or the idea of a sleeve and body piercings. But you know what Jesus said?
“blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me (matt 11:6)”
Jesus spoke these words to John the Baptist when he was in prison about to get beheaded for scouring the streets and spreading the word that Jesus was that hero the people were looking for. The solution to all their political, religious, and spiritual strife. But Jesus basically told John, while you are in prison about to die, I am healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, making parapalegics dance, and I’m not rescuing you from prison. Jesus was like, I have a diff plan for your life, hopefully this will not sway your faith in me, thank you for your life of service and following your barbarian call.
Jesus’ purpose was not to save us from pain and suffering, but from MEANINGLESSNESS.
What are you doing to not live a meaningless docile life??
One person I know that is living breathing inspiration as a catalyst to this problem is my friend Logan. read her blog to understand:
http://logankaynes.theworldrace.org/
Matt 10:16, we are called to live in this world as citizens of another kingdom and jesus never said it would be easy.
I want to be
how very avant garde
