JR. Forasteros - March 5, 2017
The First Failure
We don’t like rules. Especially when it comes to religion, we see rules as God’s way of restricting us, keeping us from living a full, fun life. But the story of the first sin reveals that God’s “rules” lead to life for us. How can we turn to God in faith and find the life God calls us to?
From Series: "Lent is for Losers"
Too often, we think faith is about winning - getting our way in the culture or in our homes. But during Lent, we'll trace the human journey through the Old Testament and see that getting what we want never works out like we hope. We'll see how Jesus enters into our failure and becomes a loser just like us. Somehow, his failure is good news for us. It turns out God is for losers, which is good news for all us failures.
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I was my high school biology teacher’s worst nightmare.
Not because I was good at biology – I really wasn’t. But because I walked in on the first day of class and warned him, “If you’re going to teach evolution, we’re going to have problems.”
And sure enough, on the day it came time to teach Evolution, I was locked and loaded.
My church had prepared me to go into my public school ready to defend my faith! It’s what Christians call ‘apologetics’, which for me growing up meant being able to out-argue all the atheists and scientists I encountered. I had to defend God’s honor.
The only minor complication was that my science teacher was also a Christian. I can still remember the pained look on his face as he taught biological evolution to our class as I sat loading my rhetorical clip with all the ammo my church had sent me with.
I saw myself as a righteous warrior.
I was preaching God’s Honest Truth to my class, holding back the tide of godless lies flooding out of our textbooks and off the chalkboard.
It never occurred to me to wonder why my classmates didn’t seem grateful, why none of them seemed even the least bit curious to meet this God I was so stridently defending.
It never occurred to me to wonder whether God found my defense particularly helpful.
I want to talk a little bit about apologetics, about how Christians go about defending our faith. Because if you look around, or listen to some of the loudest Church leaders, you’d think our sole mission is to stand against a sweeping tide of secularism and pluralism and fight back.
That approach is all wrong. God doesn’t now nor has God ever needed us to defend anything. And if there’s any account we are to offer the world, it’s a self-sacrificial, vulnerability that invites those outside the faith to come closer to God. Today, we’re going to find a vision for how we interact with our friends, neighbors, coworkers and family who don’t share our faith.
