We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
How We Are Defined
Zack Hunt wrote a piece called Abortion, Gay Marriage, Immigration, Gun Control, and the Church over at A Deeper Story. He points out that we have a big problem on our hands when it comes to the ways we have come to be defined by these issues. Christians are primarily defined in our culture for what we’re against. But Jesus was not known in this way. And we are called to follow him. What are you known for?
From Zack’s article:
Ironically, many of us in the church have taken the complete opposite approach to bringing the kingdom of God to earth just as it is in heaven. Instead of going out of our way to incarnate the radical love and grace of God to our neighbors and enemies alike, more often than not we seem to go out of our way to avoid doing just that. Rather than extend grace, we vote it down at every chance we get. Rather than loving our enemies and serving our neighbors, we treat them as subhumans, not worthy of the dignity and respect we demand for ourselves.
Rather than being and doing, we denounce and abstain.
But if the name Christian is going to have any credibility, then we have to actually live our lives like Christ did.
Which means we have to live lives defined by what we’re for and what we actually do.
Category: General
Tags: Church, Kingdom Living, Love Your Neighbor, Politics, Zack Hunt
Related Reading
Christians and Creation Care
Image by Ali Inay While the mustard seed of the Kingdom has been planted, it obviously hasn’t yet taken over the entire garden (Matt 13:31-42). We continue to live in an oppressed, corrupted world. We live in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” Not only this, but we who are the appointed landlords…
Racism: Why Whites have Trouble “Getting It”
I’m a member of a special task group on racial reconciliation that consists of a dozen or so pastors from around the Twin Cities. We’ve been meeting periodically for the past year or so in order to strategize how to help the Church of the Twin Cities as a whole move forward in racial reconciliation.…
You Have What We Call a Theological Problem
Peter Enns posted a blog entitled: Dear Christian: If the Thought of Either Romney or Obama Getting Elected Makes You Fearful, Angry, or Depressed, You Have What we Call a Theological Problem. He makes some pretty good points. What do your emotions around this election tell you about where your hope lies? From the blog: There…
Voluntary Suffering and the Kingdom
In a post from two days ago, I wrote about the call to voluntary suffering for others as it is laid out in the New Testament. For the first three centuries of the church, Christians understood this call as they sought to follow Jesus’ example of forgoing the use of violence and expressing God’s self-sacrificial…
Put on the Armor of God
The whole of the Christian life is an act of war against the enemy as we follow Jesus in storming the gates of hell (See post.) No passage better illustrates this than Paul’s metaphor of spiritual armor from Ephesians 6. He writes that Christians are to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength…
7 Ways to Join the Kingdom Revolution
In the previous post, I introduced in short form the call to participate in the kingdom revolution that Jesus began. What does this mean for us today? Let me offer seven ways we are called to the Jesus revolution: When Jesus set aside the riches of his divine prerogatives and sided with the poor and…
