Sunday, May 26, 2013

Animate Faith 7 | Church: An Imperfect Family

Pop Quiz!  Get out a No. 2 Pencil, your Big Chief tablet, and answer the following questions…

When people think of “church”, what descriptors come to mind?  When you think of “Church”, what metaphors come to mind?  What are the reasons why you attend church?  Why does the church exist?

Why do you think that in every study of church attendance, more older people attend than younger, more women than men, more southerners and upper-mid-westerners than New Englanders and Westerners, more browner-skinned people than whiter-skinned people (per capita), and more evangelicals and Mormons than other denominations?

What role does church play in your life?  What role do you play in the church’s life?

I have never known an extended period of time in my life that I did not attend church regularly.  And by regularly, I mean every week.  Even in college, when nobody was making me, I rarely missed church.  This is not to suggest, however, that there have not been times when I wanted to take a season off.  Sometimes church can get so routine that it loses the drawing power it once commanded.  Sometimes we don’t really want to connect much with God, so we don’t want to go to church, since church is designed to facilitate that meeting.  Sometimes we miss so much church that we feel weird going back.  Sometimes people from church hurt our feelings, so we naturally avoid that space.  Sometimes we hurt others’ feelings, and avoid church, too.  Sometimes we feel like nobody knows we’re there, so we stop going.  Sometimes we miss several services for good reasons, and nobody misses us, and that hurts, so we stop going.  Sometimes we just don’t give a rip about our faith, and everything else becomes a higher priority.

So what’s the draw, anyway?  Why bother with church, especially since you can enjoy the podcast of hundreds of great Christian speakers and hear great worship music on Pandora all in the comfort of your own home, with messy hair, in your underwear, drinking coffee and eating lightly buttered pop tarts?  Just try it.  Then let me know if it’s worth trying…

Some make the trip because church is their social club.  Some because it’s a very personalized classroom.  Others because it’s cheap entertainment.  Others because they know they will find some form of healing within the walls of a church. 

Bruce Reyes-Chow offers the metaphor of “family” for church.  Imperfect for sure, but a place where love for each other abounds.  Pretty good descriptor, I think, since every family has a very interesting cast of characters that create a messy, diverse community.

All of the metaphors have merit, don’t they?  What do you see as the merits of each metaphor?  Drawbacks?

None of them are especially compelling for me.  Not that they completely lack attractive qualities – they do – but are they what Jesus was talking about?  Are the above descriptors along the same vein as that which captivated Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph’s allegiance?  Are they related to what moved Moses, Aaron, Caleb and Joshua to risk everything to embrace it?  Are the pictures of Church similar to what kept the Judges Deborah, Samson, Gideon; Kings David, Solomon, Hezekiah and Josiah; and Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Elijah and Elisha enthralled?  Are the images of Church above what led Peter, Paul, John, James, and the rest to give their lives to it’s cause?

The Church was and still is the next iteration of what God began with Abraham.  A different path for humanity to follow that is fundamentally for everyone, everywhere, that produces the best life can offer because it is rooted in relationship with God expressed in personal devotion, community support, and servanthood.  It’s different because it isn’t about ourselves – it’s about God and others.  It’s an alternative to the loud voices of culture which promise to deliver life at its best but never can. 

When Jesus and his disciples spoke of Good News and salvation, he was reframing popular terms used by the Roman Empire to promote itself wherever it held power. Commit to Rome and you will enjoy greater peace and prosperity – the salvation of your very life.  Their military might and efficient roadways made this a reality in many ways.  But fell short, because it was ultimately for the glory and service of Caesar, not God, and therefore could never address the deepest cries of our hearts.

Jesus invited people to follow him on the Way that leads to life.  It was profoundly different than the way of Abraham’s Iraqi option, Daniel’s Babylonian option, Jesus’ Roman option, and our Western Capitalism option.  Different because it requires personal sacrifice – not for self, but for God and others – as the means to the life offered.  We can easily embrace a way that calls us to sacrifice for ourselves, but others?  With no apparent personal gain on the horizon?  Yet this is precisely what Jesus called for, and what he did with his own life.

We see this God-created human potential shine in times of crisis.  Moore, Oklahoma has given us new stories of heroism starring elementary school teachers and medical staff who used their bodies to shield those they knew they needed to protect.  When we celebrate Memorial Day, we pause to remember the ultimate sacrifice given by thousands in order to protect peace in the world.  These sacrifices inspire.  They are beautiful.  They transform us.  The Church Jesus calls his Bride, his Body, is called to make that a way of life, realizing that we really do hold the keys to life and death.  We really do.  Following Jesus leads to life for us, and life for those we sacrifice for.  Life for us because we find ourselves drinking from the same source of life as did Jesus.  Life for others because we bring them with us.  All acts of loving service.

Some, however, may be reluctant to invest in the church for many reasons.  Maybe you’ve been disgusted by the judgmental and narrow minded expression that sometimes rears its ugly head.  Maybe you’ve been burned by people in the church – disappointed by your family members.  Well, guess what?  No matter if you commit to the Way or not, you are going to face frustration by narrow minded, judgmental people.  If you choose the Way or not, you are going to be disappointed by people.  We’re all human, remember?

The difference is that our hope is in Someone much greater than ourselves and those who hurt us.  And, the pain we endure as we sacrifice for the Way is not in vain.  If we allow it, it actually is transformed into something that makes us deeper and stronger.  This is a great paradox of Jesus’ Way – the positive stuff takes us higher (of course), but so does the hard stuff.  Our deepest needs are met as we seek to serve the deepest needs of others.

Serving others is really rooted in loving others.  So, I wonder how many people we can lovingly serve into the arms of God over the next year.  How many people can we lovingly pray for?  How many can we touch by joining in a cause they are passionate about, like The Relay, or Relay for Life, or some other worthy cause?  How many can we lovingly ask about their lives to see if we can support them somehow?  How can we lovingly invite them to something that may really help them find resources they need to live in the Way?  How many of us will learn serious caregiving skills through the Stephen Ministry launching soon at CrossWalk?  How many will lovingly serve babies in the nursery so their parents can catch a worship service kid free?  How many will lovingly teach kids who have little knowledge of the Way of Christ?  How many will lovingly show up to lead youth who often wonder if they are loved?  How many people will we love by providing food they don’t yet have?  How many orphans will we feed because we lovingly give?  How many abused women and children will we love here in Napa and in Tijuana with our support?  How many people will we love by inviting them to join us at CrossWalk where they will be surprised by how welcomed they feel, how good the music, and how hopeful the message?

You and I have the opportunity to really make serious change in the world we live in with the Good News of God’s love and grace.  What will stand in our way?  What will be more important in our schedules?  What will we be glad we invested in when our lives come to a close?

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Animate Faith 6 | The Bible: A Book Like No Other


What you read in your current Bible is an English translation of a nearly identical text that was read at the end of the first century.  For the Old Testament, a great affirmation of this truth came with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – scrolls of biblical text 2,000 years old that are nearly identical to what we have in our Bibles called the Old Testament.  More copies of the New Testament writings circulated – by far – than any other ancient text, which increases our confidence in its reliability.

Some people simply stop at that point and place their full faith and trust in the Bible – it’s the reliable Word of God. 

But what do we mean when we say Word of God?  According to a 2007 Gallup poll, roughly 31% of Americans believe that the Bible is literally the Word of God, meaning that it is either infallible (divinely dictated and therefore incapable of error) or inerrant (divinely given and not including errors).  In other words, the text is black and white – what it says is what God meant to say.  For 47% of Americans, the Bible is inspired (God- or Spirit-assisted and human-written and therefore trustworthy).  In other words, while God is part of the equation, the human element is quite evident and significant.  The remaining 19% see the Bible as a human collection of fables, legends, and history.  What do you think?

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter much if all we do is read the Bible devotionally, asking God to inspire us in some way, or if we simply read the Bible as literature.  But if we are going to claim the Bible as some sort of authority in our lives and for how we practice our faith, how should we proceed interpreting such an ancient text?

Whatever view seems closest to your own, there is a process we all must go through if we really want to understand the Bible’s timeless principles.  The process is directly related to our hermeneutic – a fancy word that refers to the way we think about the Bible in an academically critical way.  Not critical as in mean and nit-picky, but as in thoughtful and careful.  When we read a text, what series of questions do we ask ourselves as we consider what the text says about God, ourselves, and how we might want to live?

The good news: there are some texts that require very little work.  Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan, for instance, has a pretty easy take-home lesson: care for the person who needs it even if it costs you time and money and may come with risk.  In short, love.  But even that black and white text comes to life in living color when we learn more about the characters involved, the geographical setting, the audience Jesus addressed and the religious culture of Jesus’ day.  But the good news is that there are plenty of scriptures that have easy lessons to teach – so read the thing and learn how it instructs your faith and life.

For many texts, however, we need to do some homework.  We must realize that the Bible was not written in our time, and was not written with us in mind.  The worldview of our ancestors is not like ours.  The way they thought about their physical world, gods, ethnicity, gender, status could not be more different than that held by the majority of us in the Western world living today.  Certain of this, we must then be careful to keep this in mind when we engage a text.

By the way, it doesn’t matter how you view God’s role in the Bible’s authorship.  Even if God dictated every jot and tittle, we must still work to understand what the text meant for the original audience, since it was written for an intended audience.  Especially if you hold the inerrant or infallible view, this is important.  Otherwise, the God who authored the Bible is an uninformed fool who, though claiming responsibility for creating the earth, described it not as a sphere orbiting the sun but more like a snow globe at the center of the universe around  which everything else revolved.  But you wouldn’t know that that was an issue unless you did some homework.  That’s why it’s important – don’t do your homework and you may end up looking and sounding like an absolute fool.

Discovering what the ancients thought is critical, and leads naturally to a next step: once we know what the text was about and what the take-home points might be, we need to ask what the dynamic equivalent is for us.  For instance, the Apostle Paul instructed early Christians regarding eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols.  Some of the early Christians thought that eating the meat was an act of idolatry, since the animals were offered as sacrifice to foreign gods.  Other Christians, including Paul, didn’t see a problem with eating the meat as an idolatry issue, because they didn’t believe any other gods existed except the One True God proclaimed by Christ.  Yet Paul advised those carnivorous Christians to not eat the meat in the presence of those who struggled, since it became a stumbling block for those weaker in the faith.  All this talk about meat may make a Napan start wondering which type of wine is best paired with sacrificed meat…

There is nothing sinful about drinking wine in moderation.  Jesus did, for crying out loud!  Growing up in a Baptist family, however, such behavior was so frowned upon that it was sin for us.  Even though I like a good glass of wine – and since I’ve lived in the Wine Country I now know one when I have one! – there are some people who would stumble if I had a glass of wine with them over dinner.  It is not sin to drink wine.  But knowing it will make my dinner companions uncomfortable and drinking in front of them anyway is an act of self-centered uncaring, which I believe is a culpable disturbance of shalom – a pretty good definition of the word sin.  The wine can  wait for another meal with different companions…  So, we learn context, understand original application, and apply the principle forward.  If we hadn’t done this, the issue would be left as an unhelpful reference, only to apply to our lives in the event we were faced with the temptation to eat sacrificed meat!

This practice was carried out by ancient Rabbis.  Sometimes they would encounter a text that they could not apply to a current situation.  So, naturally, they tabled it!  They pushed it aside – ignored it – until such a time when clarity gave them insight.  To do the same would be to embrace the time-honored tradition of shoulder-shrugging.  Sometimes I think we are too quick to jump to conclusions – and other times much too slow – when we should probably enlist the holy shoulder shrug and admit that we don’t have clarity on some texts and some issues.  Some texts seem so entrenched in their original context that it is really difficult to glean a decent contemporary application.  Some issues are more complex than meets the eye, requiring a lot more thinking than a quick application, and a good amount of public shoulder shrugging and confessing that sometimes we don’t know the mind of God, but we do know we are supposed to love, so we choose that.

The Church has muddled too slowly and emotionally with issues that require deep thought.  The result has been that the thinking culture has increasingly written the Church off as a source for critical thinking.  Slow on women’s rights.  Slow on responding to the racial divide.  Slow on gracefully responding to the pain of divorce.  Slow on anything and everything dealing with human sexuality.  Slow on dealing thoughtfully on immigration issues.  Slow on championing peace when the country was faced with war.  Slow to forgive some politicians, too quick to embrace others based on party colors.  Slow, I think, because it may be afraid that if we go against the face value of the Bible, the world may wonder if we should take the Bible seriously at all.  What the Church doesn’t realize, however, is that we don’t take the whole thing seriously already – just the parts we champion during certain seasons.  Know any men who shave?  Any women with short hair wearing makeup and jewelry?  I rest my case.  The world has moved much more quickly on its own, and hasn’t known to miss us.

That has to change.

The Bible isn’t any less of a resource than it was for the ancients.  God is still God.  We need devotees of both to take both seriously, thoughtfully, and passionately, living out the truth they find and making a case for the Bible’s principles in a way that wins fans instead of using the “it’s God’s Word so it must be true” trump card.  People’s lives are in the balance right now.  The grace of God being communicated to people who desperately need it is at stake.  Will you answer the call to honor the Bible for what it is and can be?

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Animate Faith 5 | Cross: Where God Is


One of the weirdest things I’ve been told: a guy named Jesus died on a cross for me.

That’s amazing, since he lived 2,000 years before me.

I never quite knew how to respond to this declaration.  Thanks?

I mean no disrespect here.  It’s just that the idea of it never resonated very well with me.  I can understand it intellectually and theologically, but have struggled to really connect with it personally.  This, by the way, does not then become a cause for increased prayer for me on your part – OMG, Pastor Pete hasn’t embraced Jesus’ crucifixion yet!  No worries about my faith and commitment to Christ here – I’m as “all in” as I know to be.

What I am realizing – and what Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber gets at in her video segment in the Animate Faith series on the cross – is that there are different ways to look at Jesus’ crucifixion.  How we understand the meaning of the cross says perhaps as much about us as it does about God.  Reality: our view of the cross is incomplete.  A diamond sparkles because it is multifaceted.  The cross is similar in that regard.  It’s meaning is multifaceted, which gives it great beauty.  So, what follows is a brief description of four primary ways of understanding the cross.

Four primary ways of viewing the cross.
1.  The Cross as Victory over Evil.  In this view, we think of the devil holding us captive ever since Adam and Eve made their fateful choice.  In order to save us, Christ gave himself as a ransom, trading his life for ours, and since he was resurrected, his work on the cross also symbolizes Christ’s victory over death – the devil’s great weapon.  Of course, this way of seeing things says a lot more, theologically, than that Jesus simply gave his life out of love.  Is God so powerless that he cannot defeat the devil without such an act?  Is the devil really that strong?  Despite these issues, there is power in this metaphor.  Sometimes we feel like we are in another’s control.  We feel trapped.  We feel like without an outside helper, we won’t make it.  So when we hear that Jesus came to save us from our captivity, it resonates with us.  We feel great relief and gratitude to the One who loved us enough to conquer the power of death over us.  Does this resonate with you?

2.  The Cross as the Satisfaction of God’s Wrath.  Looking at it from this vantage point, God has made the Way clear from the beginning.  We know right from wrong, and yet we choose to do wrong.  Over the course of a lifetime, counting every little bad thing up (even thoughts of bad things), it overwhelms whatever good we may have done or thought.  And so, when we come before God, we find ourselves on trial, having the evidenced weighing against us.  We realize we’re toast – we have no hope for God to let us into a relationship with God today or heaven tomorrow.  Enter Christ.  Being without sin, he chooses to pay the debt with his own life so that we may go free.  Or, another related way to see it: on the cross, Jesus becomes an everlasting scapegoat (like that found in the Old Testament) who carries away the sin of the world to keep God’s wrath at abeyance.  There are some ugly downsides to this way of thinking.  It makes God particularly unreasonable and ugly, for instance.  Not a God anybody would want to cozy up with.  Be afraid of a God like that?  You bet.  But hard to love.  However, there are times in life when we have blown it so completely that we are absolutely certain that God has it out for us.  We continually look over our shoulder for God to attack.  When bad stuff does happen, we are sure it’s God.  Sometimes we say that we cannot go to church because God would make the walls fall down.  So when we hear that our debt has been cleared and that God sees us not as loathsome, hideous creatures but as beautiful, radiant children, we rejoice!  What relief to know that all the crap we’ve accumulated is forgiven and cancelled out.  That’s the power of this metaphor.  Many find great comfort and strength in the cross viewed from that angle.

3.  The Cross as a Moral Lesson.  From this perspective, Jesus’ work is along the non-violence route that Gandhi and MLK took so many centuries later.  The world is not redeemed by a greater, more violent force than humanity can conjure, but rather is won over by the subversive act of unending love expressed in sacrifice.  By not refusing torture, and even forgiving those who were killing him, Jesus overcomes the worst humanity has to offer.  We are won over by love.  We are also then instructed by this act on how we should behave as his followers.  For those who are sick and tired of violence and more violence in our world, with suggestions that increased violence will somehow create less violence, Jesus’ example is compelling.  Finally, a person who promotes peace actually lives and dies peacefully!

4.  The Cross as a means of Transformation.  Looking at it this way, “the cross was the culmination of a process by which God redeemed a corrupted relationship with humanity.  God, in the person of Christ, transfused divine life into every stage of human existence – from birth to death” (from the Animate Faith Facilitator’s Guide).  This is particularly inspiring when we want to build on the God-within us aspect of faith.  We believe that God’s Spirit dwells within us, animating us, healing, inspiring, and leading us. 

So what do we do with these views?  The point of this week of the series is to recognize how we have understood the cross and what implications come with that view.  It is when we realize what we believe about something that a new way of thinking about it can take root.  Each facet of the cross is helpful, and each offers a limited view.  The question really is, how is the cross informing your life now?  Are you, yourself, cruciform?  How does that play out in our lives?  How does each facet instruct our footsteps?

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Animate Faith 4 | Salvation: Abundant Life Now


How did you first encounter the idea of salvation? Who was involved? How have you defined salvation? What metaphors have worked well for you?
A few years into being a pastor in Napa, CA, I hit a wall.  When I moved out west from northern Illinois, I thought I could just plug in the basic evangelical church growth stuff that worked in the Midwest and it would – of course! – work where there were more fish to catch.  Stop laughing.

Well, it didn’t work for a variety of reasons.  And after four years of trying, I really began to wonder what I was up to.  I felt like a “Jesus salesman”, trying to get people to sign on the dotted line to gain their salvation.  Was that really the point of the church?  To simply get people to say yes so that their soul would go to heaven?  If so, I couldn’t stomach it anymore.

At that time, I had to pick a focus for my doctoral studies.  I decided this had to be my focus.  I went deep into the meanings of the words salvation and eternal life and other, related phrases.  What I discovered refreshed my soul and simultaneously created frustration in me.  What did I discover?  Salvation is way bigger than selling Jesus’ afterlife insurance policy.  The word mean to save, to heal, to rescue, to restore.  In essence, the salvation offered by God that Jesus came to proclaim was incredibly deep, beautiful, and compelling.  Jesus was saying that if people followed his Way of thinking, being, and doing, they would find their deepest wounds healed, that they would get back (or forward) to their True Self which God envisioned in them all along.  It is an abundant life of meaning and purpose that impacts those we love, those we don’t and those who seem a world away.  As I studied salvation, I found myself saved/rescued/healed/restored, and my ministry right along with it.  Note: Thanks, CrossWalk, for being on the journey with me – it hasn’t always been easy and is often messy.

But I did mention that I got angry. 

What angered me was that this news was not broadcast from the mountaintops.  In fact, I had grown frustrated in ministry because the Good News had been minimized to a decision for heaven or hell.  It made God ugly and unfair, like a mob boss that would love you until he didn’t.  Then you’re toast.  There are a number of historical factors that created our situation today.  To spend time understanding how we got here is important and helpful, but let’s rather spend time investigating what salvation meant (and still means) in a handful of biblical passages.

And let’s not make this a purely academic exercise.  What salvation to you need?  What do you need to be saved/rescued/healed/restored from?

We all need to be saved/rescued/healed/restored from death and fear of what’s after this flesh-and-blood portion of life.  We are in luck!  Jesus addressed this a number of times.  Perhaps the most profound example can be found in the eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel.  In this story, all hope was lost when Jesus finally entered the scene.  Lazarus had been dead for four days, and Jesus called him back to life.  The unmistakable take-home?  Jesus had authority over death itself.  Jesus himself died, but was seen many times in a different, resurrected form.  Life goes on.  Lazarus died again eventually – but I imagine he approached it with great confidence the second time around.  In John’s chapter 14, Jesus assured his disciples that the life to come is real and good.  Embracing Christ’s word on this gives us great hope as our life countdown continues.  Reaffirm your confidence with something like this simple prayer:  God, I trust what Jesus said about you and what that means for my life after death.  I trust you to welcome me home when my life on this earth is over.

We all need to to be saved/rescued/healed/restored from well-earned shame.  If we think we’re perfect and have never screwed up in our lives, we would be wrong.  While we may be in denial, there are many witnesses throughout our respective personal histories that have wounds to prove the reality of our brokenness-induced missteps.  When we really get honest about this with ourselves, we are often humbled by the damage in the wake of our lives.  We wonder why God would want anything to do with us.  Sometimes this leads to a fatalistic, it’s-too-late, there-is-no-hope, I-can’t-be-anything-more perspective on life.  We sometimes feel so hopeless and helpless that we perpetuate the behavior that hurts us.  When we are in this space (and we are at different times in our lives), we need to remember the story we see in John’s Gospel (chapter 8).  The woman thrown before Jesus may have been a pawn, but was, in fact, guilty as charged.  She felt all the shame and isolation from community and God as she was forced to come to grips with her life.  Jesus’ response? I do not condemn you.  Go and sin no more.  In other words, do not live as if you are already condemned.  You are not the Titanic, and your decisions are more than rearranging the deck chairs.  You are valued by God, and can move forward in new directions with God’s presence and help.  Find healing from your wounds with something like this simple prayer: God, I trust your heart of grace and I receive your love to cleanse me and heal me.  Help me live in the Way that leads to the sin-less life.

We all need to be saved/rescued/healed/restored from prejudice.  Sometimes we get labeled in ways that deeply wound us.  We find ourselves having to live out a script that we didn’t choose, that we don’t want, but the rest of the characters in our lives struggle to let us break out of the role we’ve been put in.  These limiting pressures stifle our sense of hope, and severely restrict our sense of identity.  Jesus dealt with this as seen in chapter four of John’s Gospel.  The woman at the well that he met in Samaria was placed in a deadly script that isolated her.  Jesus freed her from that role as he let her know who he was and that she was valued by God.  Embracing this truth over the limiting script of her peers, she found new life, and was even a herald of the news to the community that rejected her!  If you are stuck in a limiting role that you no longer want, embracing and following Christ leads to freedom to become the real, true you God made you capable of.  Find healing and restoration with something like this prayer: God, you know who I really am and who I can really become.  I embrace Your love for me and the dream you have for my life.  Help me trust You over the voices that serve to constrict me.  Help me learn the Way that leads to life abundant.

We all need to be saved/rescued/healed/restored from a small life.  This one is sometimes tough to see due to the comforts we enjoy here in the United States.  At some point, perhaps when we’re finally quiet long enough to listen, we are haunted with the question of meaning.  Is our life simply about making money, buying more stuff, taking more trips, climbing the social ladder?  Should I feel content with more power and authority?  Is becoming more and more religious really what it’s all about?  Highly successful people in Jesus’ time wrestled with the same questions.  Military commanders.  Rich people.  Religious leaders.  All of them comfortable.  All of them dissatisfied with the lackluster results their pursuits provided.  Jesus addresses this issue as he conversed with Nicodemus (John 3).  Nicodemus was highly educated and enjoyed great power as an elite religious leader living in Jerusalem.  When he talked with Jesus, though, his worldview unraveled.  He thought he might be going to tell Jesus a thing or two, and maybe dismantle some of Jesus’ errant thinking.  Instead, Jesus talked about an invitation to a renewed life by the very Spirit of God.  He spoke of a quality of existence here and now, referring to it as eternal life.  The way to experience that exceptional life was to devote one’s thinking, being, and doing to the Way God was proclaiming in the life and work of Jesus.  This is the essence of believing.  When we don’t believe in Jesus – when we don’t orient our thinking, being, and doing around the Way God has shown us – we experience the lack of life that Way affords.  We condemn ourselves, really, by our indecision or indifference or denial or rejection.  We suffer a small life with limited meaning and impact.  Want a bigger, more meaningful life?  Find restoration in something like the following prayer: God, I don’t want to live a meaning-less life in pursuit of stuff that doesn’t matter.  I choose to trade up to Your Way over my much smaller ways.  Help me learn how to move my thinking, being, and doing in Your direction.

Salvation extends to every aspect of life.  Personal identity.  Marriage.  Parenting.  Aging.  Environmental concerns.  Global politics.  World peace.  Everything you can think of, really.  But  these four areas, in my opinion, are really core for us, and provide a great foundation from which we can build our lives.

The question is, now that you know what salvation is really all about – probably bigger than you may have imagined or entertained – what are you going to do going forward?

Within twenty years after the first Easter Sunday, the Apostle Paul challenged Jesus followers from the church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 3:10-15, NLT):
Because of God’s grace to me, I have laid the foundation like an expert builder. Now others are building on it. But whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have—Jesus Christ.
Anyone who builds on that foundation may use a variety of materials—gold, silver, jewels, wood, hay, or straw. But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value. If the work survives, that builder will receive a reward. But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames.
May you build wisely and well.

Bonus: To discover some ideas about how you might find yourself living in eternal life,  check out these verses: 2 Corinthians 6:1-3; Ephesians 5:15, 16; 1 Peter 4:7-11; 1 John 2:15-17; Ephesians 4:26-5:2