Just one thing...

So, for the last few weeks I’ve been engaged in a study of the book, “Irresistible Revolution,” by Shane Claibourn, with a few guys from church. This is a great book, and I highly recommend it – though, if you read it I would caution you, it could mess you up!

This morning’s discussion was quite disturbing… in a good way. Shane was discussing the idea of following, really following, Jesus, and what that might look like. He pointed out that, at some point, “we stopped living Christianity and started studying it (pg. 71 paragraph 2).”

It forced me to take a look at my beliefs (not a short job, and certainly on going) and ask myself – “how much of what I believe get’s in the way of living a Jesus-life?”

He quotes SØren Kierkegaard – and I want to put that quote here as well as a challenge to us all.

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any word in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the World? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to insure that we an continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall in to the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.” (SØren Kierkegarrd, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegarrd, ed. Charles E. More (Farmington, PA: Plough, 2002), 2001)

So – here’s my thought. One - what of your beliefs, your Theology, gets in the way of following Jesus? And, two - what if we were to take any teaching in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging ourselves to act accordingly? What would it be, and how would it change you?