Christianity is the pure dynamic to life. Where it thrives, it...well...it thrives. The very thread of Jesus impacting every level of humanity is astounding to this very day. It is robust with joy, adventure, and confident hope. And because this Life is so profound it is equally taken to task. It is an endangered movement. Sadly, the opposition is as strong within as it is outside of the believing camps.
Why would that be the case, you ask? The answer is both tedious and simple. It's as clear as the law kills and the Spirit gives life. Christians claim to abide by the latter while assuming to avoid the former. But this is just not true. Believers tend to slip unconsciously into spiritual equations or fundamental stabilizers that trip up the grand and glorious thrill of the movement of the Living God among us.
Why is it so difficult for us to grasp that God is spirit and not systemic rules of order? I offer my guestimation. Living by the Spirit requires our flexibility. To live by the rules allows us to control the check-list and thereby gain approval or non. To live in the flexibility of God is to be ready to adjust, to reconsider, to....to....to change our minds.
Here's the threat. While redirecting the minds of unbelievers toward God, we lock ours down with perpetual looking to the right and to the left to see if we are in sync--not with the Spirit, but--with fellow believers of our same systemic persuasion. The result? Christianity in its very mission is stuck when at its very core it is anticipated by the heavenlies to be the opposite. Freedom always makes the jailers nervous.
Do you study to prove what you already believe or do you also dig to discover what else there is to believe? We are to be about both. Yet, in too many homes I fear the Bible has been shelved as a mere proof of texts rather than a revealer of awe. The Spirit of God has eternal elasticity designed for our incredibly God-rebirthed (day by day by day) hearts. The wonder of it all is like looking over the Grand Canyon times a bazillion only to toss in forty-five oceans. This is what we are to experience....experience beyond knowing...Ephesians 3:19-21.
The Christian movement struggles when we participants learn something like twenty-five truths and set out to both promote and preserve them. On the other hand, it explodes with fascination when we hold those twenty-five truths dear without being threatened to learn the next 500,000 truths which perfectly align or demand readjustment of the earlier truths we felt we had captured.
If we don't get a grip on the smothering of our children by presenting law-keeping as the goal, the foreign religions are going to have a harvest in the next two decades. Loosen up and learn...of the Spirit of God...which will never fit into our tidy and uniformed religious proof-texts.
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