Ran across this in a column by Leonard Pitts; found it interesting because he is not an overtly christian writer, but mostly it really resonated with something Evonne and I (and our church as a whole) have been thinking about and discussing lately...
We specialize in cheesy expressions of faith here in God's favorite country. Indeed, you could build a tower unto heaven itself out of all the roadside Jesuses, prayer cloths, Ten Commandments rocks, and other trinkets of a cheap, disposable faith that says nothing, costs nothing, does nothing, risks nothing, and speaks not of God, but only of the grubby, temporal perspectives and fears of ground-bound women and men.
Last November, the University of Chicago published a study quantifying the blazingly obvious: people tend to create God in their own image, to ascribe to the deity their own opinions, interests and beliefs. But is that really faith, when you reduce God to a bigger version of you?
Mother Teresa's faith drove her to foreswear material riches and spend half a century working to uplift the wretched poor of Calcutta.
Martin Luther King's faith drove him to gamble his very life in a dangerous campaign to win human and civil rights for African-American people...
The point is not that we can do what Martin Luther King did or be who Mother Teresa was -- we all suffer in that comparison. Rather, faith is seen in the substance of a life lived in service to others, lived as if God were not in fact one's personal echo chamber in the sky.
(More to follow).
You've been prayed for today...
J
1 comment:
This RST is a healthy reminder to check our sources. Where are we getting our idea of what God wants from us? Sometimes, (especially in some churches) I think that people tend to react to the given culture-we brashly rebel or we meekly comply or we live in a constant state of "Who knows, who cares? Are there any real answers?"
But that isn't good enough.
The beauty of Christianity is that it's pretty darn simple-the only way is through Him-and it's a personal relationship. So nobody gets to tell us what to do, but we don't get by on our good looks either.
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