Laugh without smiling.

Go ahead. Try it.

Best Story Ever.

Here is the understanding of the Jesus story in a nutshell:

God is real.

God is not a white man sitting on a cloud, but is the very source of life and love and beauty in the universe. God is love. (1 John 4)

Love cannot be confined, so love creates. (Genesis 1)

Human beings are meant to be co-creating, image bearing, creation tending embodiments of God in the world. (Genesis 1:27-29)

We screw it up. (Genesis 3-present day)

Two thousand years ago, a man named Jesus tells people that God is not done with human beings, not finished with Creation. He said it like this, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." He tells them that God's future world is not like this one. There won't be any more war or poverty or racism in that world. No more sin and selfishness to mar God's good world and destroy relationships. No more power-hungry human rulers like Caesar to rule over them, but God alone. No more death, disease or famine.

So they kill him.

But He doesn't stay dead. He rises from the dead like he said he would, and the world is changed forever.

One of Jesus' best friends put it this way, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God... The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us."

That force of life in the universe..that power that holds molecules together and that causes plants to shoot up out of the ground...whatever it is that keeps the trilliions of cells in our bodies working together to keep us breathing... God. God puts on human skin and tells us that it's not over yet. Creation is not done. Someday all things will be restored (Matthew 19:28, Revelations 21, Romans 8, Ephesians 1:10). We believe that in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, God has dealt sin and death the decisive "death-blow", and is now beginning is grand project of restoration. This is "good news", it is "gospel".

Jesus is God's plan for the healing of creation, and when we live our lives "in Christ", we become a part of the "new creation" that God wants to bring into the world (2 Corinthians 5:17).

What You've done

I’ve tasted Your glory and I left it there. Your poured out Your Spirit and I didn’t care. Still you loved me. I’ve lived for myself with nobody to blame. I took what You gave me and squandered Your grace. Still You loved me.

Nothing compares to what You’ve done for me.

I could live for the broken and share in their pain. I could die like a martyr or live like a saint just to love You. I could sing like the angels and gather Your praise: Be blessed beyond measure and give it away just to love You.

Still nothing compares to what You’ve done for me.

My heart has been broken; I’ve laid out my shame. Because of Your mercy, all I can say is I love You. So I’ll tell of Your story, I’ll carry Your name. I’ll live for Your glory Lord, I’ll share in Your pain just to love You.

Nothing compares to what You’ve done for me.

Nothing can separate us. Not death or life, or depth or height, or unseen power now or ever!

Wonder

Speak up sir and clearly state your name
Did you say you are the Son and came to save
How in my right mind should I believe
That a life exists beyond what I perceive

Change all my fear to faith in you

I'm forgetting all I know and I'm leaning on Your love
Yes, I see now...All Your Wonder
My mind will now make room for all the truth that is in You
And I see now...All Your Wonder

Let me journey to the unveiled place
Where my selfish wills and ways become untraced
Suddenly my vision's getting clear
When I see the answers reasons disappear

Hebrews and Hyphens

It seems odd to have to say so, but too much religion is a bad thing. We can't get too much of God, can't get too much faith and obedience, can't get too much love and worship. But religion --the well intentioned efforts we make to "get it all together" for God--can very well get in the way of what God is doing for us. The main and central action is everywhere and always what God has done, is doing, and will do for us. Jesus is the revelation of that action. Our main and central task is to live in responsive obedience to God's action revealed in Jesus. Our part in the action is the act of faith.

But more often than not we become impatiently self-important along the way and decide to improve matters with our own two cents' worth. We add on, we supplement, we embellish. But instead of improving on the purity and simplicity of Jesus, we dilute the purity, clutter the simplicity. We become fussily religious, or anxiously religious. We get in the way.

That's when it's time to read and pray our way through the letter to the Hebrews again, written for "too religious" Christians. This letter deletes the hyphens, the add-ons. The focus becomes clear and sharp again: God's action in Jesus. And we are free once more for the act of faith, the one human action in which we don't get in the way but on the Way.