Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony.
-Colossians 3:12-14 NLT
Picture Credit: Mike Putnam
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“The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.”
-David Brower
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Church is not a building. Church is not an event that takes place on Sundays. I know, its how we think of it. “I go to First Baptist.” “We are members of St. Luke’s.” “Is it time to go to church?” Much to our surprise, that is not how the Bible uses the term. Not at all. When the Scripture talks about church, it means community. The little fellowships of the heart that are outposts of the kingdom. A shared life. They worship together, eat together, pray for one another, go on quests together. They hang out together, in each other’s homes. When Peter is sprung from prison, “he went to the house of Mary the mother of John…where many people had gathered and were praying” (Acts 12:12).
Anytime an army goes to war or an expedition takes to the field, it breaks down into little platoons and squads. And every chronicle of war or quest will tell you that the men and women who fought so bravely fought for each other. That’s where the acts of heroism and sacrifice take place, because that’s where the devotion is. You simply can’t be devoted to a mass of people; devotion takes place in small units, just like a family.
We have stopped short of being an organization; we are an organism instead, a living and spontaneous association of individuals who know one another intimately, care for each other deeply, and feel a kind of respect for one another that makes rules and bylaws unnecessary. A group is the right size, I would guess, when each member can pray for every other member, individually and by name.
This is the wisdom of Brother Andrew, who smuggled Bibles into communist countries for decades. It’s the model, frankly, of the church in nearly every country but the U.S. Now, I’m not suggesting you don’t do whatever it is you do on Sunday mornings. I’m simply helping you accept reality – that whatever else you do, you must have a small fellowship to walk with you and fight with you and bandage your wounds. This is essential.
-John Eldredge, Waking the Dead, 192
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But now is the time to get rid of anger, rage, malicious behavior, slander, and dirty language. 9 Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds. 10 Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him.
-Colossians 3:8-10 NLT
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“The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.”
-Gregory Maguire
Picture Credit: Mike Putnam
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We aren’t meant to figure life out on our own. God wants to father us. The truth is, he has been fathering us for a long time-we just haven’t had the eyes to see it. He wants to father us much more intimately, but we have to be in a posture to receive it. What that involves is a new way of seeing, a fundamental reorientation of how we look at life, and our situation in it. First, we allow that we are unfinished men, partial men, mostly boy inside, and we need initiation. In many, many ways. Second, we turn from our independence and all the ways we either charge at life or shrink from it; this may be one of the most basic and the most crucial ways a man repents. I say “repent” because our approach to life is based on the conviction that God, for the most part, doesn’t show up much. I understand where the conviction came from, battle it constantly myself, but still-it’s faithless, is it not? We must be willing to take an enormous risk, and open our hearts to the possibility that God is initiating us as men-maybe even in the very things in which we thought he’d abandoned us. We open ourselves up to being fathered.
-John Eldredge, Fathered by God, 11
Picture Credit: Evgeni Dinev
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Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand. Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory.
-Colossians 3:1-4 NLT
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“Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.”
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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Every hostile encounter Jesus has is with very “churchy” people. This spirit is the great enemy of our life with God, and it is this spirit that Jesus warned his boys about when they were whispering in the boat about the bread: “Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” and then he says it again, to make sure they are paying attention: “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt. 16:6, 11).
If you would know Jesus, love him, experience him, you must pay very careful attention to this warning. And friends, you don’t heed this simply by making the Pharisees the bad boys of the Bible, like the villains in a melodrama. That is not what Jesus meant. You are already deceived by this stuff if you place the danger “back then, in Bible times.”
The religious fog uses sanctified words and activities, things that look and sound very Sunday school to distort our perceptions of God and our experience of him. If you want to know him as he really is, to experience him just as intimately as the disciples did, you are going to have to clear out the religious fog.
-John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, 192, 193
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Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
-Colossians 2:16-17 NLT
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