A Year and a Half

I only just remembered I had this.  Call it a desperate attempt at escape from outside responsibilities (aka studying -_-;; ).  But I suppose it's a more wholesome distraction than say... building more pylons and Zealots, or seeing the a Heat player's next attempt for an Oscar.

"Hollywood as hell" as Joakim Noah likes to put it.

Let's talk about the church.  More specifically, what is the church, and His Kingdom supposed to look like?  How is it that we are able to easily welcome newcomers to our church, but so easily also show so much disdain and contempt for people that have wronged us, even within the church?  I wish for my church, and for all churches out there, that people walk in and think "These people are happy."

A place where there is that freedom the bondage of having to perform at a certain standard.

But so many of us don't do this.  We expect people to act a certain way, to do or not do certain things, and we begin to build walls around us.  And we only allow people that fit or act a certain way into those walls.

The Old Testament is familiar to us.  The time when God had His people go through ceremonial cleaning in His temple in order to worship him.  How that turned from recognizing/remember that God was so holy that we as man couldn't attain it, to turning it into legalism... saying "We're going to protect the law, we're going to live out the law."

We know how this goes, better than we even realize ourselves.  You know we have Jesus that we all believe and we follow.  And this Jesus that we know and follow, we feel the need to protect Him.  Protect the Bible, protect the church from those kind of people who can or has defiled it.  Right?  Those people that we think if we allow to sit in our pews or if allow ourselves to know them that the church will become dirty or unclean.  We've become like the spectators when Jesus saw Zacchaeus and said he wanted to stop by his house; we grumble.  We start on the path of ostracizing them in our hearts.

Well guess what.  Jesus was walking around, and a bleeding woman comes up to him and touches His robe and becomes clean.  Why is she healed?  Because with Jesus, there is nothing that can defile Him.  But rather He has the power to cleanse and redeem.  But for some reason we've adopted this stream of thinking that we need to protect the church.  If the Gospel were to come in contact with something that happens or people that are dirty, that it will defile and impurify the Gospel.  That is all wrong.

The church has so many subtle ways of living in this old paradigm of thinking, that Jesus came to undo.

With condemnation of sin also comes restoration.

We need to see how utterly powerful the Gospel is, and see the grace, mercy, joy and forgiveness that flows from that.