Yesterday, while Greg (my senior pastor, boss, supervisor, head honcho dude) was preaching about Deuteronomy 6 and how God was retraining the Hebrew people to be something more than freed slaves, God started working in me and a blog was being born.
The people of Israel were primarily concerned with being NOT-slaves. They were done with Egypt (mostly, usually, except when things got really bad). Their primary concern with leaving Egypt was not being slaves anymore. However, they didn't really have a positive understanding of who or what they were supposed to become. They certainly didn't believe that they could march into an occupied land, do battle, take over, and establish a new nation. (The ethical debate of social conquest is duly noted, but let's set it aside for now.)
God was asking Israel to be something far beyond NOT-slaves. God was calling them into being God's representatives in the world, God's agents for blessing all peoples. God was forging them into a new nation that should function as the embodiment of God's purposes and desires for humanity. They were God's children, God's family, God's special possession, a holy nation, a royal priesthood. That is infinitely more than NOT-slaves.
Today, we Christians (and a whole lot of other folks as well) often define ourselves by what we are not. We live NOT-lives. We are NOT-heathens, NOT-immoral, NOT-liberal, NOT-gay, NOT-pro-choice, NOT-whatever, NOT-too-many-things.
But God is calling us far beyond NOT-living and NOT-theology. God is calling us to be holistically good representatives of his love and grace in our world. God is calling us far beyond resisting the bad into creatively and persistently celebrating and causing the good. Live primarily FOR the good, not against the bad. That is the live into which God calls us.
God was asking Israel to be something far beyond NOT-slaves. God was calling them into being God's representatives in the world, God's agents for blessing all peoples. God was forging them into a new nation that should function as the embodiment of God's purposes and desires for humanity. They were God's children, God's family, God's special possession, a holy nation, a royal priesthood. That is infinitely more than NOT-slaves.
Today, we Christians (and a whole lot of other folks as well) often define ourselves by what we are not. We live NOT-lives. We are NOT-heathens, NOT-immoral, NOT-liberal, NOT-gay, NOT-pro-choice, NOT-whatever, NOT-too-many-things.
But God is calling us far beyond NOT-living and NOT-theology. God is calling us to be holistically good representatives of his love and grace in our world. God is calling us far beyond resisting the bad into creatively and persistently celebrating and causing the good. Live primarily FOR the good, not against the bad. That is the live into which God calls us.
No comments:
Post a Comment