The practical step...

I have been reflecting lately...

Our church has been focusing quite a bit lately on what it means to follow Jesus. We have been dialoguing about the central message of Jesus, what He desires for us from the bigger perspective of the whole person; laying down your life and picking His up, pursuing spiritual disciplines as a way of allowing God access to our hearts, recognizing that Jesus' way of life is more concerned with helping us to become a certain kind of person rather than getting us to a certain destination, recognizing that becoming that person is largely a matter of internal "spiritual" realities that manifest themselves in our daily actions (as opposed to the external 'daily actions' themselves), understanding that the central act on our parts that allows us access to God's way of being is to confidently trust that what He says is the truest possible thing to say and what He does is the best possible thing to do; all of this has served as the 'bigger picture' of what it means to follow Jesus, which, is the place that most Christians lack proper understanding the most.

I believe that we approach Jesus from a very disjointed perspective, separating His various statements from each other, treating them as self-sufficient platitudes instead of peices in the larger whole of Jesus' way of understanding, doing, and being; and separating His teaching, His actions, His relationships, His death, and His identity into completely isolated aspects of what He was trying to accomlish. This then prevents us from understanding much of what He really desires; much like a man staring at a collection of puzzle peices may tell you what the whole looks like from what He has put together, yet if he only has a small portion of the peices in place, He cannot truly know what the whole is. We in the protestant lineage have argued for too long that the whole picture is two or three of the peices that we have put together! We need to begin putting the puzzle peices back together (as many have been doing) before we make claims about what the 'point' is; to drop the metaphor, we need to understand Jesus as He understood Himself before we try to decide what His fundamental purpose for our lives might be.

...enough of the rabbit trail...

I have felt that now is the time to begin to look again at the 'nuts and bolts' of following Jesus. With our understanding of the blueprints as a whole, it is now time to start looking at where to put the building materials, and how to start building...

We are going to approach some very common aspects of human existence and ask the question, "How does our understanding of who Jesus is, and what it means to be His student, apply to this area of our lives?" In light of our belief that Jesus lived the best possible kind of life, and that He wants to share that life with us, how should we think and act in the areas of human sexuality, personal finance, conflict and confrontation, entertainment, employment, political involvment, family relationships, etc.

We need to stress constantly the larger issue of learning, in submission to Jesus, how to live; but, it is time to focus on the practicalities and actualities of 'how to _________.' I believe that this will also give us, ultimately, a deeper insight into the bigger picture of life in God's Reality; understanding in very specific terms what it means for us to 'sell everything we own,' in order to attain the 'treasure in the field.'