Up front, I have to admit one of my faults. I'm one of those people who can take a very simple idea and make it complex. Someone may say something like, "Let's go rake the leaves," and I'll try to come up with the most efficient plan for doing it, as well as figuring out how to rake the leaves to a particular position in the lawn where they won't be subjected to the wind, and where we have to carry the disposal bins the least distance. I can overplan something simple as this.
Over the last few years, I have read a number of church related books dealing with making things simple. The primary author whose books I have been reading is Thom Rainer, president (I believe) of Lifeway, a Christian bookstore chain. He has written a number of books on simplifying things, like churches, life, and everything in between. And I have really started to appreciate what he has been writing about.
When I think about the message that God shared with us through Jesus, one of the things I most enjoy about studying it is that it is such a simple message, but one with so much depth that we humans will never mine it to its depths. That simple message is that God created the world perfectly, but that the very first man and woman disobeyed God, and that disobedience (the biblical word is sin) is now entangled in all of us, and is inseparable. But God had compassion on the world, sending Jesus to take the sin and guilt of all of that, and kill it on the cross. In God's grace, every single sin of this world has been conquered and destroyed, and God gives the promise of a new life where those things will never haunt us again. We receive that grace through our faith in that action of God in Jesus and the cross and the resurrection. Such a simple message.
But being humans, we have a tendency to take simple things like this and make them incredibly complicated. Since we have such a hard time understanding how God could do all this by His grace, we want to find some way that we have a role in it. Or, we start to say that people who are engaged in sinful activities (usually hand-picked ones that we like to get up on our soapboxes about) cannot receive that grace until they change their life. (Think of the irony of that statement: you can't get God's undeserved love and favor until you show that you deserve it by changing your life. Weird, eh?) Or we try to discover some basic level of competence that you have to have in understanding the teachings of the church before you really have God's grace. (Again, you can't receive God's undeserved love and favor until you "know" certain things, sounds almost like a gnostic heresy which was condemned way back in the life of St. John.)
And what makes this even more incredible? God still shows His grace to us in spite of our all too human efforts to make that simple message complex. Even though we may try our best to show why we deserve God's grace the most, God still makes it clear that our faith in His loving action in Jesus, no matter how strong or how flickering it may be, is still enough to receive that gift.
So simple! Only God, whose mind is truly far above ours, could come up with something so simple.
Over the last few years, I have read a number of church related books dealing with making things simple. The primary author whose books I have been reading is Thom Rainer, president (I believe) of Lifeway, a Christian bookstore chain. He has written a number of books on simplifying things, like churches, life, and everything in between. And I have really started to appreciate what he has been writing about.
When I think about the message that God shared with us through Jesus, one of the things I most enjoy about studying it is that it is such a simple message, but one with so much depth that we humans will never mine it to its depths. That simple message is that God created the world perfectly, but that the very first man and woman disobeyed God, and that disobedience (the biblical word is sin) is now entangled in all of us, and is inseparable. But God had compassion on the world, sending Jesus to take the sin and guilt of all of that, and kill it on the cross. In God's grace, every single sin of this world has been conquered and destroyed, and God gives the promise of a new life where those things will never haunt us again. We receive that grace through our faith in that action of God in Jesus and the cross and the resurrection. Such a simple message.
But being humans, we have a tendency to take simple things like this and make them incredibly complicated. Since we have such a hard time understanding how God could do all this by His grace, we want to find some way that we have a role in it. Or, we start to say that people who are engaged in sinful activities (usually hand-picked ones that we like to get up on our soapboxes about) cannot receive that grace until they change their life. (Think of the irony of that statement: you can't get God's undeserved love and favor until you show that you deserve it by changing your life. Weird, eh?) Or we try to discover some basic level of competence that you have to have in understanding the teachings of the church before you really have God's grace. (Again, you can't receive God's undeserved love and favor until you "know" certain things, sounds almost like a gnostic heresy which was condemned way back in the life of St. John.)
And what makes this even more incredible? God still shows His grace to us in spite of our all too human efforts to make that simple message complex. Even though we may try our best to show why we deserve God's grace the most, God still makes it clear that our faith in His loving action in Jesus, no matter how strong or how flickering it may be, is still enough to receive that gift.
So simple! Only God, whose mind is truly far above ours, could come up with something so simple.
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