Reading the Fine Print

So far in our journey over the last few weeks, we have talked about how and why to stay plugged in to Jesus. This week we’re shifting gears a bit to talk about what it looks like when we get it right. As it turns out, along their walk from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus told the disciples one thing it would look like. The picture He painted, though, wasn’t pretty. Yet this picture has formed the reality for a great many of His followers over the centuries. Let’s talk today about the sometimes tough reality of what staying plugged in to Jesus looks like when we get it right.

Reading the Fine Print

What would you do if your faith was put to the test? I’m not talking about some kind of a pen and paper test. I’m talking about the kind of test where you are challenged to live and act in a manner consistent with your faith with the full knowledge that doing so is going to bring trouble into your life as well as the lives of the people around you. Over the past fifteen years, our culture has seen several Christian individuals put to just this kind of test. They have been approached by one person or another and asked to provide a service or involve themselves in an action which their core Christian convictions informs them is morally impermissible for followers of Jesus to take part in. In several of the most high profile of these cases, the believer courteously refused to participate in whatever it was. You can perhaps guess what was the response of the world. To put it mildly, it wasn’t good. 

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Digging in Deeper: Grab Bag

Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

This past week, we have talked about the value of staying plugged in to Jesus, hypocrisy, contradictions, God’s sometimes painful efforts to help us grow in His image, and the importance of a response of kindness to provocations rather than one that is merely in kind. And as the week has unfolded, each one of those things have made their way into the national news cycle in one way or another. Now, this doesn’t mean anyone in the media was talking about any of the issues through any of these various lenses, but as careful observers of culture through the lens of the Christian worldview, we can see the connections. In light of this, instead of a review of a recent show or film today, I thought we’d do a quick review of some of the news of the week through the lens of what we’ve spent the last week talking about. Here we go.

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