JR. Forasteros - March 8, 2015
Images and Idols
When someone challenges our identity, we get angry. But maybe the problem is that we’ve built our identities on the wrong things. Israel made the same mistake – they had allowed the Law and the Temple to define who they were, and injustice flourished. Jesus’ temple cleansing and the 10 commandments help us to identify the idols in our lives so that we can confess our sin and ground our identities in God. We can be free to engage others with generosity and love when we’re not busy protecting our sense of self.
From Series: "Can You Hear Me Now?"
Throughout history, God has made covenants with humanity. These covenants are promises to be faithful, to trust, to live together in peace. And over and over, humanity has broken those covenants. But now that God has come in Jesus, he is restoring broken covenants, healing broken relationships, reestablishing peace between God and humanity. This Lent, we look to Jesus to transform us and make us whole.
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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.
