This Beautiful Mess – Chapter Two

October 11, 2007

books / spirituality

Chapter two of This Beautiful Mess covers the idea that Jesus cannot be separated from his kingdom.

We have taken His free salvation insurance like those folks on the hillsides who ate His free lunches. Then we go home. We carry with us a nice Jesus with a cool title. But all the same, we go home king-less.

And here we sit telling Jesus he can be our Savior, but he has no relevance to our lives. He’s not smart enough to understand what we deal with on a daily basis. We evangelicals are so good at this. We want everyone to accept Jesus and take on our beliefs, but we don’t think he is capable of or cares about influencing the world around us through our daily lives. He doesn’t care about war, or the environment, or the poor.

And liberals all too often go the opposite direction. Jesus said a lot of great things, and we should go out and feed the poor and help the sick and maybe even have a revolution and overthrow some corruption, but Jesus doesn’t care how screwed up we are, and isn’t capable of or interested in changing us.

Great book. I can rant about this stuff all day, but again, what am I doing about it? How is it changing me, internally or externally? I need this kind of challenge.