...continued from Part 1
Maybe
we don’t realize that the new creation started on that first Easter morning. Maybe
we don’t want to realize it. Maybe right now is the first you’ve heard of it,
and maybe later you’ll wish you hadn’t. Living in the present reality of the
new creation means we don’t get to just shake our heads at those poor, lost
sinners while we hide together and sing songs about flying away from it all. And
living in the new creation means we don’t get to turn the church into a club of
do-gooders without any real change within ourselves. No, if the new creation
has begun—or more, if we’re two thousand years into it!—then we’re on the hook.
Things should be different, starting with us.
Clueless
and gasless and heading for Mexico, I finally decided I would take the next
road that went east. “Texas is a big place,” I thought, “and even though I
don’t know where I am, if I just start heading east maybe I’ll get there
eventually.” I made it up into the distant eastern hills and basically coasted
down, and there I happened upon a little town. In my troubled mind it was
Bethlehem housing the hope of my mobile world. I rolled into the quickie mart
on fumes, filled up, bought a map, and got myself back on track and eventually
back to Texas.
The world is too small and fractured not
to carry it into that something beyond.
It’s
time to turn east (so to speak). Life is too short and narrow not to step into
something beyond our little circumstances. And the world is too small and
fractured not to carry it with us into that something beyond. Don’t we want to
leave a legacy of holiness for the next generations beyond just do dress nice for Sunday school and don’t curse or chew or go with girls
that do; do support the right
political party and don’t have a beer
in your fridge or cable on your TV; do
love the sinner but hate the sin and don’t
associate with the wrong sorts of people; or whatever little holy lists we make
up?
Don’t we want to be the kind of people through whom God’s kingdom is coming
on earth as it is in heaven? In short, don’t we want to be spittin’-image,
chip-off-the-ol’-block offspring of God? If so, then it starts right here,
right now, inside each of us—struggling wanderers filled with the power of
perfect love, the power to become children of God.
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