I haven’t met a single person (including myself) that doesn’t think they have at least one aspect of life figured out. We generally go around rolling our eyes and wagging our heads at the behavior and words of others. At our jobs, at grocery stores, bars and church. If only they knew what we knew!

I do it all the time. I saw a lady coming out of Publix the other day, apparently healthy, young, beautiful and holding her very expensive purse on her arm as she pointed an elderly employee, who was pushing her very full cart, toward her fancy car. Oh, I had plenty to think and say about her.

I always know better. We all do, don’t we?

Christians do this to each other concerning theology too. Some worse than others, yeah, but we all think we’ve got at least one aspect of our faith pegged. And we search like a hungry lion for someone to correct.

I sincerely despise seeing this in Christians. It’s one my major pet peeves. I want to choke them out, screaming, “It’s about love, you moron! Love!” …Yeah, I know I have issues.

But it really is about love, you know?

John 13:34-35 says, “a new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (NIV)

(Also, to name a few more: Mt 22:37-39, Rm 12:10, Jn 4:7-8, Mt 5:44-45, John 15:12-13, Rm 12:8, etc.)

To be sure, the command to love is such an overwhelming part of Scripture that you’d think it’d be hard to ignore. But I do it every day.

Love, the bible says, is how the world knows we’re from him. (Not our goodness, it’s important to note.)

Knowing that not only are you loved, but the whole world (jn 3:16) is loved too means gives us freedom to interact with the lost. But we also have to understand that we aren’t going to the lost as those who are better than them, but sinners who’ve found God’s grace. To quote Luther, we are “beggars telling other beggars where they found bread.”

Jesus was known, because of his indiscriminate love, as a friend of sinners. If we’re not in danger of being labeled that too by the uptight religious sort, we’re doing something wrong. Because of God’s unlimited love, not only are we free to have dinner with prostitutes, it’s important that we do. Unconditional love reaches out to be friends with the sexually deviant, play cards with the drunkard, laugh with the inmate.

An understanding of our deep need of God’s love and grace lets us do that without an ounce of pride. It lets us see ourselves as no different than (dramatic music!) them! The only difference, to be clear, is that we already received the free gift which is also available to them.

If you need a little help with that last bit, 1 Corinthians 5:12 says, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the body.” That’s God’s business, the verse goes on to say. It does say, however, that we’re to judge within. But keep your guns in their holsters. Even that’s not what you might think.

Here’s the thing: We’re not anyone’s mother. When I see you going what I consider a little too far I don’t have to feel the need to correct you. When you say something I wouldn’t necessarily say, I can let it pass. Of course, if you come to me talking about cheating on your spouse, I’m going to tell you the truth. But my point is that I don’t have to correct your course in every opinion you have that I disagree with or every action I couldn’t imagine doing myself.

Let each other breath. We’re all imperfectly growing in Christ.

Love is the key to all of this. Doing to others what you’d have them do to you is a beautiful example of love in action. I don’t want to be talked down to. Check. Don’t do that to others. I don’t want to be shamed. Check. Don’t do that to others. I want to be loved unconditionally.

Check. Do that to others.




Photo used under CC
4:33:00 PM
I don’t have anything to say. I mean, I can sometimes put something on a page that can make you feel or think. I can speak something in front of a crowd that you might take home. I’m pretty good at winning arguments. But that’s not the same thing. I’ve got no meaning. Not without something else. Another important ingredient.

The bible says something interesting about meaning, and it applies to pretty much every situation. It says that I can do everything right. I can feed the homeless, dress the naked, preach the good news and even die for my faith and it won’t mean a thing (nothing!) if it’s not done in love. It’s meaningless. Not less meaningful. Ultimately meaningless for us.

The bible says over and over again that life is about glorifying God. Any Christian who’s been to church more than a few times knows that our Salvation comes solely from God, not our works. They know that even our good works are inspired in us by the Holy Spirit. All praise, ultimately, belongs to God. But, you give us the smallest of reasons to take credit and we’ve gobbled up the whole shebang.

I want a pat on the back. I want the awards and the praise. I want to be recognized and thought of as wise and generous, kind and thoughtful. I just want to pay lip-service to God and secretly hoard it all for myself. I want, and I hate to admit this, religion.

Not that helping widows and orphans nonsense. The tit for tat, good news: Chad is awesome and much better than you sorry sinners religion. I hate that about me.

Capon wrote that God “wants empty vessels: preachers who have no religion left to preach.”

I want that too.

I really do. That’s the Spirit, by the way. I’d ignorantly choose the self-aggrandizing nonsense.

To do that takes total reliance on God. It takes reliance on him, not to clean us out like dirty pipes, Mario Bros. style, but to put whole new pipes in. You think that’s not scary? We’ve got our five-year plan and day-planner to think of!

He wants us connected to him permanently. And not as some integral part to the system, but as a conduit of his perfect love and grace. We’d screw it up. He finished it. He’s the root, we’re the vine. He’s the tree, we’re the branches. But, look, fruit! Connected to God, we become capable of doing that which we could never produce on our own.

So worth it.

When I stop thinking that kumquat of love is all me, maybe then I’ll stop acting as if I’m conveying a message to sinners whom I have nothing in common with. I’ll stop seeing the bible as a first-person shooter, where I’m the hero, blasting those wretched sinners, and realize I’m the wretched sinner. When I’m empty of all my rules-based religion, arrogant correction and unloving speechifying, I might have something worthwhile to say.

My voice will be softer and my eyes might not look so much like razor blades.

I might love the unlovely, the liars, the lustful and the ungrateful, because I finally see myself in their eyes and recall the Savior’s gentle forgiveness. 



Photo used under CC
10:05:00 PM
“What is the author trying to say here?” I’ve heard that (and thought that) many times as a student. That phrase has ruined the fun of more than one book for many a person. The reason is because someone is trying to reduce the excitement, truth and downright joy of a book into a moral lesson. You ask most authors what they were trying to write about and they’ll tell you about the characters and the plot. Most authors don’t sit down to try and teach people a lesson. They just tell the story. The bible is much the same.

I was a really bad student. Looking back, I think it was basically due to my immense authority problem. I loved learning—I was always gathering up information about this and that—but as soon as someone told me I had to learn, I was scribbling drawings of superheroes in my notebook. I’m sure I’m not alone here. So, why do we do that?

The law ticks us off.

I grew up listening to the stories in the bible and, to this day, I don’t think I have a favorite bible story. I don’t have one that I recall fondly from my stay in Sunday School. They’re all neutral to me. That’s probably because they were always sold to me as some sort of moralistic puzzle. They weren’t just cool stories about warriors and miracles, they were grassy fields that I had to push through to find hidden meaning. I don’t recall them fondly because I probably never saw them as stories at all, I just saw them as work.

“What is the author is trying to say here?”

We want morals. We want David’s story of killing a giant to be about conquering that tough interview, getting through a Cancer diagnosis or our struggle with porn, with God’s help. We think of Noah’s story in terms of the bad people getting theirs and the good earning a place on the boat.

We never stop to think that maybe not everything has to have a moral, and that God is not one of the Brother’s Grimm. Perhaps all the stories collected in the bible aren’t to teach us how to be better people but rather that God is gracious and will provide a substitution, or that he’s just but has a stubbornly soft heart. Perhaps the bible isn’t just a book of stories from which we are to draw morals, but the narrative of a God whose love is greater than our sin, and is insistent upon our redemption.

In short, the bible might not (gasp!) be about us so much is it is about God. It’s a love story, but we’re the slovenly, cheating prostitute that he can’t help but love. He doesn’t, Pygmalion-style, teach us proper manners and how to pass as the highfalutin beauty as many of us think he does. No, we’re not to read into the Scriptures some formula to look, smell and act better. He comes to put our old selves in the ground completely, reviving us to newness. God’s story is much grander than some instruction manual. It’s the story of his pursuit of us in our evil, but it’s certainly not a story about how to be good.

The bible is the story of a patient Father who will not allow even death to stand in the way of his quest for his children. He will pass through death’s door, and kick it down for good, to be by our side. 
10:29:00 PM
God’s love is crazed. There’s nothing seemingly rational about the way in which God shows affection to his creation. When we talk about love, we throw all of these catches on, just to make sure nobody that doesn’t deserve loves accidentally gets some splashed on them. But, God, he turns the bucket completely over onto the undeserving and smacks the bottom.

I can’t help but think this is the kind of love Jesus is talking about when he says that all the law and the prophets can be summed up in a lifestyle of loving God and loving your neighbor. All of God’s commands are summed up tidily in the command to love. But not our kind of love. Not the kind that expects something in return or doesn’t give until it receives. It’s God’s love—the kind that breeds scandal and misunderstanding from those with their underwear on too tight.

Jesus told stories about God’s type of love. He talked about people showing up at the crack of dawn to work in the boiling sun getting paid a fair wage only to see the no-goods who showed up an hour before quitting time getting the same amount. He talks of parties where the important people are all too busy to show up, so anybody from any gutter, street corner or bar stool could come as long as they were willing. It’s crazy, upside-down, nutso world, where the least of these are the most of the these and the last in line find themselves getting first place while the first are standing on their tippy-toes just to catch a glimpse.

It’s a love that accepts us just as we are, soaking us to the bone with grace. Then we find ourselves whistling the tune. Doing a little jig to the music. Dancing and singing like we never thought we could. There is no comprehending the logic of God’s love. It doesn’t follow our broken rules. It sounds stupid to help those who can never help you back. It seems foolish to we criminals who worship justice. But to those who recognize that they’re withering away in this weltering world, it’s butter, baby. And it’s free.
8:55:00 PM
We lied to you. We sat in church every Sunday and we sang our songs and read from our Holy Book and forgot that you were out there, lonely and alone. We brought you booklets telling you how far away from God you were but left you hungry and homeless. We told you how hot hell was going to be for you but never told you that you didn’t have to work your way to Jesus.

We’re sorry.

We pushed you away with our self-righteousness and then blamed you for staying there. We said ‘I love you in the Lord,’ but we betrayed you by never showing you His face. We ignored your questions until you just stopped asking, and then we said you had a hard heart.

We were wrong.

We never looked in the mirror. We never thought that it could be us. Until now. Now we see. Now, we know that we are no better than you. Now we know that we can’t change you and that we do not have to. We realize that if Jesus can change us, then we don’t have to stuff our religion down your throats. We hope our apology isn’t too late. We don’t always look like the God we serve.

But don’t judge Him by us.

It’s not about you and us. It’s about you and Him. So, go to Him. Ask God if He’s there. Ask Him to show you the Truth about this Jesus. Because Jesus is the only Truth, the only good, we have. The only one that matters.


(by chad west and chuck slocum)
4:53:00 PM
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