Revival

Well, not so much a spiritual revival...there's no twitching bodies in the aisle or anything...but a revival of my blog!!

So I've begun preaching through the sermon on the mount. I'm beginning to understand why people typically avoid it. It's not necessarily the easiest teaching in the world. Certainly I'm not a big fan of how people have normally interpreted it. Currently I'm in the Beatitudes. There are a number of schools of thought as to how to figure out what Jesus was talking about. Most of them teach that it is our duty as followers of Jesus to put the beatitudes into practice...that these are Jesus' high ideals around which we ought to orient our lives. In other words, if we are good Christians, we will work hard to become poor in spirit, to mourn, to be meek, to be merciful, and so on. Some would go as far as to say that these are the entrance requirements into the Kingdom of God...do these things and you're in.

I have a real problem with the beatitudes as Jesus' ethics for us to live by. First, they don't really make sense. So if I'm a good Christian, I need to seek out persecution? I need to look for things to mourn? I need to become spiritually and physically impoverished? Also, a list of things to do might fit a Pharisaical perspective, but it flies in the face of the freedom that Jesus teaches everywhere else. Instead of releasing us, it confines us to guilt and shame because we can't live up to his expectations and causes us to avoid Jesus' teachings all together.

I've been reading books by people like Robert Guelich, Glen Stassen, and Dallas Willard who take an entirely different perspective. The focus is on the blessings of the Kingdom, not on what is done to attain them. The focus is prophetic rather than legalistic. Blessed are you when you find yourself in a place of spiritual bankruptcy because God is on the way to rescue you, redeem you, and restore you to wholeness. You are blessed when the world has crashed and you are mourning the life that you could have had because God is coming to make all things new through Jesus. You have access to the Kingdom now because God sees you in your brokenness and desperately wants to restore you.

This is the freeing message of the Gospel...that Jesus has come to restore all things that are broken.