Jesus Can Heal and Fill Our Humanity And Personality

"The purpose of his life, death, and resurrection was to ransom you from your sin, deliver you from the clutches of evil, restore you to God so that his personality and his life could heal and fill your personality, your humanity, and your life. This is the reason we came. Anything else is religion."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Saturated With Information But Don't Know Jesus

"The best thing we can do now is pause, before we are saturated with more information about Jesus, and begin to discover him for ourselves.... "Come and see." As Philip said to Nathanael (John 1:46) Come and see for yourself."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

-

Not Invited To Speak By Our Slave Masters

"This is a slave's life not to speak one's thoughts!"

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals 

Cynical

"When you live in a world rocked by scandal and (journalistic) exposé multiple times a day, you just grow cynical."

John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

We Dont See Our Sinfulness Nor Others.

"It's not just one issue. But its everything around us and everything about us. And there are many of us who have lost an understanding of the radical nature of our sinfulness. And as a result we have lost an understanding of the radicsl nature of the sinfulness of those around us as well."

- Voddie Baucham

Fake Humility

"In fact, doubt - masquerading as humility has become a condition for acceptance in our times. People of strong conviction and bold claims are suspect. We Fear them.

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw 

Pretending We Don't Have to....

We don't appreciate Jesus's cunning because we insist on clinging to our naive view of the world. We just want life to be easy; we just want life to be good. We don't want to deal with evil, so we pretend we don't have to. 

We don't want to navigate sin either. We prefer our coffee house chit-chat, our Twitter-level engagement. We play at church. It's as though we think our mission and our context is something other than what it was for Jesus. Even though he said, "As the father sent me, I am sending you."" (John 20:21)

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw 

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Righteous Indignation of Labeling

He will not be baited into their traps he will not be sideline as a member of "this group" or "that position."

Guilt by association is an easy trump card in public life. If you can label your opponent as Right-Wing or Liberal, Fundamentalist or Charismatic, you don't even have to argue your case.

Your fellow partisans will dismiss the culprit with righteous indignation. Branding someone prevents them from ever being able to prove they are innocent, state their case. It's a cheap and effective Ploy that's been around a long time, a particular favourite. . . ."

John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Contentwd Counterfeit Piety?

"The more you fall in love with Jesus' genuine goodness, which is true goodness, the more you will absolutely detest the counterfeit of a false piety and it's shallow morality."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

By Their Fruit You Will Know Them

My Confusion

Issue Is Internal Before External

The issues are, first and foremost, internal, before they are ever external.

What goes in the mouth is overshadowed by what comes out of mouth. For it's connected to the heart.

Millennia old insight, so simple, such a shocking revelation to what's in my (our) heart.

Truth Isn't A "Conviction"

But truth is not like conviction. Conviction might be a matter of personal opinion, but truth is like a great mountain, solid and immovable whether we like it or even acknowledge it. Christianity is not a set of convictions it is a truth. The most offencive thing imaginable.

Jesus is a rock, all right. "A stone of stumbling and a rock of a fence." Romans 9:33 (NASB)

A rock is offencive in your shoe, because it is an inconvenient. If we said, "Away with all rocks!" We would wish the planet right out from under our feet. But a rock is also the only refuge from the raging seas. The shipwrecked soul doesn't curse the rock because it is immovable; he claims to it, weeping for gratitude."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw 

Dedication To Truth

We must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is and ongoing process of dedication to reality at all cost."

- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Truth Isn't A "Conviction"

But truth is not like conviction. Conviction might be a matter of personal opinion, but truth is like a great mountain, solid and a movable whether we like it or even acknowledge it. Christianity is not a set of convictions it is a truth. The most offencive thing imaginable.

Jesus is a rock, all right. "A stone of stumbling and a rock of a fence." Romans 9:33 (NASB)

Softie Spirit Of Our Day

"The spirit of our day is a soft acceptance of everything except deep conviction in anything."

- John Eldredge

We Didn't Add Doctrines We Erased Them

"Most attempts to convince the world that Jesus was a "really great guy, not mean and dogmatic like You-Know-Who" (usually meaning Republicans in the religious right) carry their task all the way to the point of hiding or eliminating the exclusivity of Jesus.

"Well, yes, but he didn't mean all that. These are doctrines added later by the church."

Practically the opposite is true - Jesus said it very clearly. It is the church who has often tried to explain it away."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Jesus Speaks No Silly Unreality

"One of the things I most respect about Jesus is his inability to speak nonsense. There is none of that vague Eastern mysticism such as you find in Meng Ke: "A person of great love has no enemies in the world." Jesus Christ proves that is a ridiculous statement. Or the nihilustic "Practice doing nothing and all will be well" of Lao Tzu. There are no Ben Franklin colloquialisms, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned."

Think of it - what if Jesus was primarily known for saying something like, "Remember to stop and smell the roses"? Proof that we have encountered a distinct personality in Jesus is his ability in one tender moment to say the kindest thing and the most startling words the next. What do you make of someone who can lovingly whisper. "Then neither do I condemn you," then shout "Snakes! Reptiles! Sons of hell!"

- John Eldredge -

Beautiful Outlaw

Where Is The Jesus Nonsense?

Oh, there isn't any. 

"One of the things I most respect about Jesus is his inability to speak nonsense."

- John Eldredge -

Beautiful Outlaw

Growths Beginning Point

" Until we are humble enough to resume learning, we are not true 'disciples' of the Son of God. Openness precedes learning and growing. What we thought was right all along may or may not be right after all; only honest investigation can settle the matter. If what we have been taught is right, our personal study will result in transforming tradition into genuine faith; if anything we have been taught is wrong, we do ourselves a favor to discover and move away from it."

-Rubel Shelly, 'I Just Want to Be a Christian

Refugees From Love

Old men of Terra! Ours is

the shame,

Of standing heavy-footed

on his name.

Beside the star-blazed dais

there he stands.

We clawed the face of Love then broke his hands.

Cry out! O men, cry out! The blood we spilt

Has left us refugees from Love."

- Calvin Miller. The Singer Trilogy

When People Of Other Views Are Not Seen As Human

They passd so near the street singer they could hear the verses of his song.

Sarkon reached down and found a heavy stone and hurled it.

The rock struck Anthems forehead such a blow he almost fell unconscious. The song abruptly stopped. The little group of street balladeers closed around him as a shield.

Everyman, incensed by Sarkon, turned on him and shouted.

"Why did you do that?"

"He sings a lie," said Sarkon.

But still he is a man. Have you some Grudge that makes you hate him? Are there reasons other than his song? "None...." said Sarkon.

- Calvin Miller. The Singer Trilogy. (The Song)

Jesus Said "You're So Pretty On The Outside."

Jesus has just entered this man's home, having accepted an invita-

rion to dinner. Every guest who has ever passed through those doors

has washed their hands before being seated, slavishly observing a custom unbroken for centuries. It is a test of orthodoxy and solidarity.

Jesus knows this, knows they are watching his every move. He walks

right past the line at the washbasin and makes himself comfortable at

the table. The Pharisee apparently is speechless. Jesus reads the look

on his face and offers an explanation: "Oh—the washing bit," he says as he takes a piece of flatbread, breaks a bite off, and chews it. “It completely clouds the issue. Outwardly you look sensational. But inwardly.

your heart is full of extortion and evil.”

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

The things Jsus says.

Jesus Sustains every Microbe Of Creation

"The point he is making is that he has come to share his life with us. But again, as soon as I say that, the old religious association's rush in to fog the reality. Imagine walking through a rainforest. Diving over a coral reef. Simply look through a microscope at a drop of pond water. Creation is pulsing with life. It is the life of Jesus, given generously for the life of all things. He is called "the author of life," who personally "sustains all things" (Acts 3:15; Heb 1:3 NRSV).

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Jesu Is Not Our Franchise

"You must understand an important distinction - there is Christianity, and then there is church culture. They are not the same. Often they are far from the same. The personality conveyed through much of Christian culture is not the personality of Jesus but of the people in charge of that particular franchise."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

We've Covered Jesus With Ashes

"We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore."

- Brennan Manning -

Pussified Jesus

Fierce and intentional (Jesus clearing the Temple).

This is a breathtaking quality especially when compared to our present age where doubt masquerades as humility, passivity cloaks as rest, and emasculated indecision poses as laid-back enlightenment.

Oh, Jesus could be soft, and he certainly was humble, but his fierce intentionality is riveting to watch."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Religious Inoculation Agaist Jesus

"Thus George MacDonald, that old Scottish prophet, asks,

“How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought, that we may have learned him wrong”

It is a startling thought. “That must be far worse than not to have learned him at all: his place is occupied by a false Christ, hard to exorcise!”

Hard to exorcise, indeed, because

religion gives the impression of having Christ, while it inoculates you from experiencing the real thing."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Religion In The Hands Of The Enemy?

And every single one of these clashes is with very religious people. Not one hostile encounter involves a “pagan.” Not until the end, at least, when the Roman

troopers get hold of him—but he was handed over by the religious

establishment.

If you were reading the Gospels without bias or assumption, you

would have no trouble whatsoever coming to believe that religion is

the enemy—or in the hands of the enemy. Jesus’ opponents are all

people we would consider to be highly invested in doing religion

right. They certainly considered themselves to be so."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

An Instruement To Teach Not Torment

"When I looked at that person

who had offended me

through the "spiritual eye," I

saw in him one of God's

instruments to teach me,

instead of one of the devil's to

torment me. I saw something

more. I saw a person God

loves, and whom He wants to

love through me."

- Elisabeth Elliot. A Lamp Unto My Feet

Jesus Did Not Appear In Temple

"Jesus doesn't even show up at the temple after his resurrection. He's at the beach, catching his boys fishing, filling their empty nets and then having them to breakfast."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw.

Gospel Doesn't Need Help

If you preach in such a way as to get a rise out of people, with the hope of then pointing them to the Gospel, you've misunderstood the purpose of both preaching and the Gospel. The Gospel, rightly preached, raises its own ruckus. It doesn't need your help.

- Les Hardin

No More Debate Over Jesus

More words about Jesus are helpful only if they bring us to an experience of him. We don't need further speculation or debate. We need Jesus himself.... For despite the vandalizing of Jesus Christ by religion and the world, he is still alive and very much himself. Through nowadays it takes a bit of uncovering to know him as he is."

- John Eldredge. Beautiful Outlaw

Moving Away From My Errors

" Until we are humble enough to resume learning, we are not true 'disciples' of the Son of God. Openness precedes learning and growing. What we thought was right all along may or may not be right after all; only honest investigation can settle the matter. If what we have been taught is right, our personal study will result in transforming tradition into genuine faith; if anything we have been taught is wrong, we do ourselves a favor to discover and move away from it."

-Rubel Shelly, 'I Just Want to Be a Christian

Marxism Caint Fix Racism

"But using Marxism as an ideological tool to end racism, is like gouging out your eyes because you have a problem with lust.."

- Michael Haukin -

Two Missions & Great Comissions

" . . . I have infected every corner

with the desire for power and greed, as you will see. I have smeared the continents with Lust For Blood not even your Invader can swab clean. (World hater)

'A thousand were unchain today," said Anthem.

"But Millions still are mine and hate the myth you love."

(World Hater)

- Calvin Miller -

The Singer Trilogy

(The Song)

Source Of The Scroll We Have?

"But some 

who do not know 

the Singer 

will believe this monster is the 

author of the Scroll you have."

 - Calvin Miller  -

The Singer Trilogy 

(The Song)

Poor In What We Believe

"There is that danger of ending up with people who look to be very spiritual, but they are very poor as far as what they believe. So how will these people pass on what they believe? What if it’s not biblical? So, for me, I have decided that I will devote a lot of time in teaching them."

- Stephen Muhota -

Lessons from the Church in Kenya: Members or Disciples?

Misdiagnosis Of Church

"When any species undergoes a reproduction crisis, a name is giving it: "endangered." Arguably Christianity has entered such a crisis; our inability to reproduce the faith is the number one problem facing our families and churches today. Christianity in the West has become a sterile, exhausted religion. . . .

The dominant means of addressing the church's reproduction crisis has been to devise new methodologies and strategies for how we do church. This is a misdiagnosis of the problem, however, and without the right diagnosis of the disease, I cure is difficult."

-Leonard Sweet. From Tablet To Table.

Punching Holes In Darkness

"Robert Louis Stevenson, who was very ill as a child, recorded a childhood incident in his diary. He was seated by a window at nightfall, watching a lamplighter light the street lights below. His nurse came into the room and asked him what he was doing. “I’m watching a man make holes in the darkness,”

- Leonard Sweet

You Cain't Compromise Enough For Pagans

The Trap

"Somewhere along the way, Christianity Today exchanged social convenience for the truth. Like many Christians, you have fallen for the mistaken belief that if you present yourself as caring about what progressives care about, then you will be spared from their slander and suppression. You will not. And the Left has made that clear. It has weighed your desperate pleas for acceptance and still has found you wanting."

- CARMEN SCHOBER. May 23, 2020. An Open Letter to Christianity Today: Change Course or Step Aside.

Why Are You Managing My Spirituality?

"For once, my place with God in solitude would be honored - not managed or directed or interpreted by a pastor or a Bible study leader or anyone else who thought they knew what I needed.

For once, I wasn't going to have to force myself into someone else's prefabricated plan for my spiritual enrichment. 

I was so glad we had been instructed not to talk, because this meant no one could intrude by asking me what was wrong or trying to "help."

- Ruth Barton. "Sacred Rhythms"

Confined To Philosophy

"When Zeno learned that the only ship he had left was with all its freight lost at sea, he said, "Fortune, you deal kindly with me, confining me to my threadbare cloak and the life of a philosopher."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

Pride In Our Today!

"I find it odd that the church of the twenty first century thinks so highly of what the Holy Spirit has taught it today that it thinks so little of what the Holy Spirit has taught the church in the 1st century, the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, and so on. The Holy Spirit is not unique to our age. The Holy Spirit has been at work in the church for the past twenty one centuries.."

- Stephen Nichols -

I'm The Benovlent Dictator

"Things are better with me in charge."

"I'm trying to do great things for the good of people,

great things for the environment."

They always think they are the "benovlent dictator.""

- Tim Pool -

Interview on Joe Rogan. 

More of Jesus More Of His Saving Fulness See

"If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “I am spiritual but not religious,” then I might not be any wiser about what that means—but I would be richer.....

In that context, people are usually trying to tell me that they have a sense of the divine depths of things but they are not churchgoers. They want to grow closer to God, but not at the cost of creeds, confessions, and religious wars large or small. Some of them have resigned from religions they once belonged to, taking what was helpful with them while leaving the rest behind......

Plenty of them are ‘satisfied, too, even as they confess that they are sometimes lonely.

I think I know what they mean by "religious". It is the "spiritual" part that is harder to grasp. My guess is they do not use that word in reference to a formal set of beliefs, since that belongs on the religion side of the page. It may be the name for a longing—for more meaning, more feeling, more connection, more life.

When I hear people talk about spirituality, that seems to be what they are describing. They know there is more to life than what meets the eye.... They would be happy for someone to teach them how to spend more time in the presence of this deeper reality, but when they visit the places where such knowledge is supposed to be found, they often find the rituals hollow and the language antique. 

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of Faith have acquired a certain patients with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive its shortcomings as they have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journey. They do not need to walk off every Cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can Harbor the sense that there is more to life than they are being shown."

- Barbara Brown Taylor 

We Join The Stream Of Prayer.

Entering a constant flowing stream. It's nothing we've started, its only a stream we enter or not, we join or not.

We Are Joining Prayer

"We never begin to pray, we always enter into prayer that has already begun before us and without us, the prayer of the church. We may pray alone, but we are never alone when we pray."

Kim Fabricius

No Time To Show Jesus' Grave

"Well, those unchainedseem filled with what I lack somehow."

"They are," replied Sarkon. "They all are filled with Madness! Be grateful that you lack what they are filled with.

"Perhaps," said Everyman, staring vacantly into the dark sky.

"Do you believe the singer came alive again?"

"No-not at all. I know the man who buried him, you see. His grave is in a country field. . . ."

"Then let us go and dig him out and show the unchained men of Terra their great Folly and absurdity."

Sarkon blush. "I. . . .wh . . . ." He stammered much before he finally spoke.

"The grave, I must regret lies far away. We have not time enough to travel there today," he finally explained. He quickly changed the subject. It's just as well believe me.

- Calvin Miller. The Singer Trilogy (The Song)

Christians With A Bar Too Low To Inspire.

"Multitudes are now turning to Christ in all parts of the world. How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from the way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today, a level that has left us tottering on the edge of world destruction. The world can no longer be left to Mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, I know that. But this is an age for Spiritual Heroes - a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that a pitching it's message to low."

- Dallas Willard. The Spirit of The Disciplines.

Human Cures For Suffering Fail

The modern age is an age of revolution — revolution motivated

by insight into the appalling vastness of human suffering and

need. Pleas for holiness and attacks on sin and Satan were

made for Centuries in response to the human situation. Today

such pleas have been replaced with a new agenda, Political and social critiques yield recipes for revolutions meant to liberate humankind from its many bondages. And on the

individual level various self-fulfilment techniques promise

personal revolutions bringing ’freedom in an unfree world'

and passage into the good life. Such are modern answers to

humanity's woes.

Against this background a few voices have continued to

emphasise that the cause of the distressed human condition,

individual and social ~ and its only possible cure — is a spiritual one. But what these Voices are saying is not clear. They point out that social and Political revolutions have

shown no tendency to transform the heart of darkness that lies deep in every human being. That is evidently true. And amid a flood of techniques for self-fulfilment there

is an epidemic of depression, suicide, personal emptiness, and

Escapism through drugs and alcohol, cultic obsession, consumerism, and sex and violence — all combined with an inability to sustain deep and enduring personal relationships so obviously the problem is a spiritual one and so must be the cure."

- Dallas Willard. The Spirit of The Disciplines.