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What path will you take?

What path will you take?. One path is easy (or so it appears). It is comfortable It is a nice, middle-class, American faith. Jesus is a nice, middle-class, American Jesus. Our faith doesn’t infringe on our comforts. Jesus wants us to be balanced.

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What path will you take?

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  1. What path will you take?

  2. One path is easy (or so it appears) • It is comfortable • It is a nice, middle-class, American faith. • Jesus is a nice, middle-class, American Jesus. • Our faith doesn’t infringe on our comforts. • Jesus wants us to be balanced. • He cares about our 401(k) and financial plan • He wants us to avoid dangerous extremes. • He brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream.

  3. Problem is…it doesn’t work • The routine of adversity. • The gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes. • The quiet despair of ever overcoming chronic temptations. • The drabness which we create in their lives. • The inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it. • Being knit to the World through a sense of being really at home on Earth.

  4. “Virtuous motives, trampled by inertia and timidity, are no match for a fully armed and resolute wickedness.”

  5. Possessions • Control • Comforts • Risk avoidance • “surely Jesus didn’t mean..” • The American dream • Prosperity

  6. Possessions • Control • Comforts • Risk avoidance • “surely Jesus didn’t mean..” • The American dream • Prosperity • Knit me to the world • Losing control • What we worship • Shrink back • Twist the Gospel • What is the true cost of achieving that “dream” • Can we ever have “enough” ?

  7. Erwin McManus • “Perhaps the tragedy of our time is that such an overwhelming number of us who declare Jesus as Lord, have become domesticated – or, if you will, civilized. We have lost the simplicity of our early faith (the abandon, freshness, power, the “I don’t care who knows…”). Beyond that, we have lost the passion and power of that raw, untamed, primal faith.”

  8. Erwin McManus • “We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die upfront and then live.”

  9. Why do these images stir us? Radical, all-in, living for something other than self, no regard for safety, willing to die to free others…

  10. Other path appears tougher… • Abandon everything – your needs, your desires, even your family • Challenges the things I am holding onto as my anchor, my foundation, my identity • “Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” • Sounds a lot different than “admit I’m a sinner, believe Jesus died for me, pray this prayer…” • World preaches “self-preservation” while Jesus is saying “die to self”.

  11. Luke 9 • Matthew 10: 44 • Mark 10: 17-25

  12. Next week – read the forward, the prologue and Chapter 1

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