Good News!

I’ve got some good news for you! Excited? Maybe that doesn’t quite get your hopeful juices flowing. Maybe statements like these roll off your back because you’ve have been bombarded with “You may have already won ” emails/letters, and “Win a free Xbox 360!!” web-site banners. Maybe you’ve heard statements like these so much that they have lost all sense of meaning and excitement. Much like a lot of the language we use to describe the wonder of the Gospel. Words like personal relationship with Jesus, born-again, and even Christianity have taken on so much baggage you can hardly find the real meaning anymore. That or we’ve used the words on such a surface level so long that we use them without even knowing what they mean. Our language is in need of Ty PENnington and an Extreme Word Makeover. I apologize for the detour through Sesame Street.

I’ve got some good news for you! Did that do anything different for you this time? Dang. Let’s try something else. Imagine your best friend telling you he or she has good news for you. I imagine hearing that from my wife and I can almost feel the excitement as I write this. Do you feel a burst of excitement at the words “good news?” Do you feel that same burst of excitement when someone mentions the Gospel, church, or the mission of Jesus? I don’t think most people do. Honestly that makes me sad. Sad because something that should be as basic as what Jesus came to accomplish has taken on all sorts of baggage that we often can’t see through the murky waters to discern the right and true purpose of the event that time itself is defined by.

When Jesus spoke of his mission he chose to refer to it as the “gospel.” The Greek word used in the New Testament for “gospel” is literally translated as “good news.” So the people of Israel heard Jesus often say something akin to, “I have some good news for you!” I think if someone of Jesus’s ilk told me he had good news for me I would be pretty stoked. But for some reason when the church talks about the good news today the world doesn’t hear that and that makes me sad.

It’s sad to me that over time we have done so much damage to the message of Jesus that in general the world hears a message of bigotry and hypocrisy. It’s sad to me that the world hears the message of Jesus as a list of rules and “thou shall nots.” It’s sad to me that the world hears the message of Jesus as something it is not.

What do you hear when you think of the message of Jesus? Is it good news for you? Seriously. Don’t just answer the “right” answer and move on. Engage your heart in the question. When you think of the message of Jesus what does your heart hear? Freedom or shackles? Love or anger? Inclusiveness or exclusiveness? Authenticity or hypocrisy?

Honestly I think we have gotten the message of Jesus so mixed and mucked up that many in the church don’t even know what it is anymore.

These Things Are Easy!

Recently an amazingly profound thought occurred to me, I mean really profound. Seriously, when you read this you’re going to be so mad that you didn’t think of it. You ready? God made me.

Pretty sweet huh? Yeah. God made me, and He made you too. I bet you’ve never heard that before. Okay so maybe you’ve heard that before. Maybe you already knew that. Maybe this isn’t so profound, and maybe I’m a no good hack. Or maybe we’ve heard this simple truth so many times that like so many other tenets of the way we have lost the wonder and depth of the thing.

Sometimes I think we gloss over some of these common truths. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, God made me, He loves me, yadda, yadda, yadda.” We hear and say these things so often without thinking that they lose the mystery, wonder, depth, and even scandalous nature of the truth. Too often in my opinion we don’t let the simplest truths soak into our heads and more importantly our hearts.

Last night I was getting set to tell kids that God designed them for a purpose, and for some reason the simple truth of that statement set in. God designed us; God designed me. I thought of Psalm 139:13, “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

If you’re anything like me you’ve always thought God in His infinite foreknowledge placed that passage in the Bible to combat the pro-choice vote. But don’t write the passage off too easily. Think about it for a second, God made you.

I don’t mean God created the physical laws by which you were made. “Johnny, when a daddy loves a mommy…” or he threw a ball of dirt and clay together like the like the god of The Far Side, “These things are easy!” I mean God made you. Let it sink in. God made you.

I’m not theologian, so I apologize to the grand profession of theologianism for this next section. Could it be possible that God was literally knitting you together in your mom’s tummy? I don’t know if it’s good theology to speak in these terms, but is it possible? Did God literally, uniquely, and individually create me? Were his anthropomorphized fingers working to form my body, my personality, my desires, my passions, my very spirit and soul?

I have to be honest; I think that might be what this verse is saying. I’m sorry for stealing your pro-life demonstrating verse, but this stuff is really getting to me. God made me! How amazing is that?!? He decided to give me brown hair instead of blonde. He decided to give me my grandpa’s gift for telling stories. He decided to make me relatively athletic.

Before my mom and dad ever thought of a second child God planned for me to be 5’10’’. He made me to enjoy reading, nature, and hot chocolate. He made me to be a passionate man, and he made me to be extra passionate about truth, masculinity, and justice.

And he made you too! Let that sink in again. What do you look like? What do you enjoy? What is important to you? What makes you come alive? God made you that way.