Kingdom Living

I wasn’t feeling well today and I was fortunate enough to take the day off. While doing a little cleaning around the house I came across this 40 cents. If I’m being honest (which I am) I was just going to throw this into the trash pile. I had no container nearby to put it into and after all it was only 40 cents. But then I realized that somewhere in the world someone is working very hard(much harder and in much worse conditions than I do at my comfortable office job) to make less than 40 cents a day. Its very easy to forget how fortunate we are. 40 cents means food and clothing to someone. To me it was trash. Shame on me.

My previous post contained a quote from Religious Literacy about the church seeing great growth because it conformed to the culture. It’s something I haven’t been able to get off my mind for some time now. It didn’t help when a buddy of mine read me a quote from a book called the Psychology of Redemption by a guy named Oswald Chambers. I don’t have the book in front of me, so I’m not even going to try to quote  it; but the gist of it is something like this:

Will the church that bows down to the culture succeed? Of course it will!

Of course the church that gives the people what they want will succeed. The problem with this is that we’ve seen the gospel fail – at least what we might think is the gospel.

When we preach a gospel that says, “Jesus wants you to be rich,” what do we expect? I would expect that if Jesus really is who he says he is then I’d get rich. When we preach a gospel that says, “Jesus came to fix all the injustice,” what should happen? There should be no more injustice. When we preach a gospel that says, “If you will just be moral enough Jesus will be happy with you,” what happens when we fail even our own morals (which we will)?

In all of these scenarios the gospel has failed, yet the Church has succeeded. There are lots of people preaching prosperity, and the seats are full. Plenty of people want to see the kingdom break through, and they see that happening by feeding the poor and doing acts of social justice. I’ve been around my fair share of people that think if they dress the right way and listen to the right music and say all the right things that they’ll be okay. The problem is that the gospel is failing. None of those things are necessarily wrong, but apart from heeding the call of Christ to repent they are empty.  Without the understanding that Christ makes us new and that’s why we do or believe these things, we will still be prideful of our works. The Church cannot continue to preach certain facets of the gospel and leave the rest for fear of offending someone or just because they don’t want to believe it. We cannot pick and choose what our gospel will be. The gospel is Christ and his redeeming power in this world. Nothing good comes apart from that. The Church cannot continue to expand at the expense of the Gospel.

This season in baseball there is a guy named Josh Hamilton who has taken the league by storm. The story was no different last night in the Homerun derby. Hamilton dominated by hitting 28 homeruns in the first round. That number beat out Bobby Abreus previous single round record of 24 (which I was lucky enough to be present for here in Detroit). But the real story of Josh Hamilton is how he went from being a number one pick to sleeping with rats to where he is today. In July of 2007 he did an article for ESPN the magazine. Here’s the link.  Enjoy!