This is worth your time!

If you have 45-50 min. - please please download the message from Mars Hill Bible Church on December 17. It is an excellent, powerful discourse on Jesus' way of non-violence based on Matthew 5:38-42. Rob Bell (the pastor) has such a way of illustrating the passage to show us how it sounded like to the original audience. It's so much more than you think it is, and much more brilliant. You will never think of the phrase: "Go the extra mile" quite the same ever again...

Looking forward to what you think.

Something is Radically Wrong

Excerpts from The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning

"Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if it is only personal discipline and self denial that will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for morning (or night) quiet time. ...Our eyes are not on God. ...We believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps- indeed we can do it ourselves." "Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our own inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut. Once the fervor has passed, weakness and infidelity appear. We discover our inability to add even a single inch to our spiritual stature..." Something is Radically Wrong

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The Furious Love of God "...He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance towards us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners. ...Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and ressurection of His beloved Son." This is the Good News, the gospel of grace. Matthew 9:9-13

The Calling of Matthew

9As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

10While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. 11When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"

12On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'^[a] For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

"It is insanity to run from God and search for love" a clip from SoulCravings by Erwin McManus

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SoulCravings: Intimacy, "The elusive nature of Love" entry 9, by Erwin Mcmanus

Some of us begin with God at an early age and run far away, searching for what our hearts long for. Sometimes the thing we want the most, we fear the most. When it comes to love, often we are our own worst enemies. When we've been hurt in the past, when we feel that love has betrayed us, we can easily become the enemies of love. To see if it's real, we do everything we can to destroy it. We tell ourselves we're testing it, but actually we're resisting it.

(I've) learned over the years that we're all actually far more comfortable with conditional love than unconditional love. "I love you because you're smart, gifted, and talented; you have beautiful blue eyes; you are unbelievably creative; you have an amazing personality; you're passionate, caring..." (See how much I've learned, honey?). The truth of the matter is that we're uncomfortable with God. We're disoriented by the way he loves.

It's just too hard to believe that if you come near to God, you will find yourself not drowning in condemnation, but swimming in compassion. Jesus called to all who were weary and who found their souls exhasted to come to him and find rest. He is telling us that God will be for us our place called home.

We run from God because we long to be loved and we have convinced ourselves that the One who is most loving could not and would not embrace us. We have no real experience of unconditional love, and it goes without saying that conditional love always leaves us wanting. We run from the One our souls crave...

Cool Quotes and incomplete ideas

"Some might say we will find a brighter day" -Oasis

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"Be the person you want to be tomorrow, today." -Brian Bushway

www.worldaccessfortheblind.org

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.


Walden or Life in the Woods
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)