Church Voices

“Often people will be told, ‘invite Jesus into your heart, become a Christian and then everything in your life will become great.’ They do this and then find out it’s not all happy and great and feel betrayed. So on the front end, what we ought to do is say ‘Please join up, we would love it if you became a Christian- join us and then take up your cross and we will bleed and die together. Welcome.’ We ought to be much more honest up front and then people won’t feel the bait and switch later.”

~Rob Bell, Sermon on 4/13/08

HT: Joe Martino

I can’t ask for God’s protection and expect that bad things that happen to other people won’t happen to me. I can’t ask for God to straighten out messes in a miraculous way and still honestly say I believe what scripture says about what it means to follow Christ in my life.

Jesus doesn’t run a protection racket, and he isn’t a rescue squad. He gives meaning to suffering and shows us the way of kingdom repentance and the cross. That’s where I am these days. I don’t want to tell unbelievers that God works things out for me because I’m on his team.

HT: Internet Monk

Of course we point and laugh at health and wealthers (as we should), but we also buy into a more subtle form of it when we expect to wear Jesus like a magical cloak that will repel cancer, divorce, death, pneumonia, and car accidents. If we expect becoming a Christian to be some sort of life bettering decision like earning a degree from an Ivy League university we may be in the wrong religion (if this is what you’re looking for Scientology might be a better fit), because scripture doesn’t promise us a magic carpet ride to easy street.

What we can expect from God, however, is to prepare and comfort us when life decides we’re due a gigantic heaping helping of hurt. There’s a scene in the movie Juno after which the title character has just given birth and has given up the baby for adoption. Juno is laying there, exhausted, and hurting from the pain of birth and of giving up a child, and her father strokes her hair and says, “Someday, you’ll be back here, honey. On your terms”.

Perhaps God as our Father looks a lot more like that than he does a super hero saving the day. Or maybe, that’s the only way Father God can look, because if God is nothing more than a gravytrain, or a magic shield protecting us from harm he becomes Rich Uncle God, or Banker God, and as good as it is to have a rich uncle, a super hero, or a banker, none of them are as good as Father.