Recipe for a glass of lemonade:
1 lemon per glass.
Fill the glass up about 80% with water.
Sugar to taste
Mint/basil optional but delicious
I went to a new church in Raleigh this past weekend that started off by the pastor going over the church’s mission statement, just to serve as a reminder of why they do what they do. Their mission (paraphrased by me) is to connect this gap that we have between our heads and our heart.
Picture this: There is a man running some errands, a few places on his list are the bookstore and costco. He has made it home and is enjoying a hot dog (with all the fixings of course) and reading his new book. The book is about animal ethics and how we are headed towards an unrealistic future with our current rate of meat production. Now think about this.
The Gap between what we know in our heads and how we act is growing at an alarming rate.
We consume knowledge and information and then store it away in the back of our brains…..and we usually only recall that knowledge to put others down and make ourselves feel smart and powerful. I personally am a huge fan of reading about ethics and sustainability, yet i’m the first one to jump in line at Old Navy and buy that $4 shirt that most definitely was produced unethically. I like the idea of ethically produced products but am unwilling to spend the extra $.50 for fair trade coffee or the extra $20 for a pair of jeans that haven’t been slaved over. Along with all of the blog posts that I read, I treat the bible with the same zeal.
I get super excited and passionate and then usually about an hour later I forgot what I even learned/read. Sound familiar?
This is all too familiar in the church. We take notes, make pretty calligraphy drawings of the quotes that stood out in particular, talk over it at lunch, make promises to ourselves that “THIS TIME I will change”, then forget it all happened and go on with our week. I don’t know about you but I am sick of this endless cycle. I’m sick of knowing something in my head and being unable to connect it to the way I act.
I don’t have the perfect answer, and I’m not writing a blog about how you need to change your life, but I am here to say that we need to stop making lemonade out of the gospel.
We’ve have to stop watering down the lemon juice until we have something that we can stomach. The gospel isn’t supposed to fit in our pocket. It isn’t supposed to be comfortable or convenient. NO it’ll wreck you and change the foundation that you’ve built your life on if you let it. It’s heavy and intense ,but it will set you free. The next time that you hear something that you are passionate about stick with it. Write it down a thousand times, live it out so that others might look over get a glimpse.
Professors didn’t write books on sustainability so we could say “oh neat idea” and not practice it. They wrote those books in hopes that people would change their habits. Jesus didn’t die on the cross so that we could wear a name tag with the word “Christian” written on it. He died on the cross so that our lives could be radically changed. It scares the crap out of me that I could live my whole entire life as a “christian” and miss the entire point.
Jesus let the weight of the gospel sink in. Help us to practice what we preach. Connect this ever growing gap between our heads and our hearts. Amen.
