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MY TH
OF a CHRISTIAN
religion
THE
MY TH
OF a CHRISTIAN
religion
LOSING YOUR RELIGION
FOR THE BEAUTY OF A REVOLUTION
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New Inter-
national Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by
permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
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09 10 11 12 13 14 15 • 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
INTRODUCTION / 9
1
GIANT JESUS / 11
2
CHRIST AND CAESAR / 21
3
THE REVOLT AGAINST IDOLATRY / 35
4
THE REVOLT AGAINST JUDGMENT / 45
5
THE REVOLT AGAINST RELIGION / 57
6
THE REVOLT AGAINST INDIVIDUALISM / 67
7
THE REVOLT AGAINST NATIONALISM / 77
9
THE REVOLT AGAINST SOCIAL OPPRESSION / 103
10
THE REVOLT AGAINST R ACISM / 113
11
THE REVOLT AGAINST POVERTY AND GREED / 129
12
THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ABUSE OF CREATION / 141
13
THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ABUSE OF SEX / 153
14
THE REVOLT AGAINST SECULARISM / 163
NOTES / 218
GIANT JESUS
11
find the Church has all but disappeared and the people are gen-
erally more resistant to spiritual discussions than those in other
cultures.
History teaches that the best way to destroy the Church is to
give it political power.
Worst of all, people in the Moral Majority seemed to imply that
agreeing with a particular political position was a precondition to
entering into the Kingdom of God. Indeed, it justified all who re-
jected the Moral Majority’s political posturing to also reject Christ.
It transformed a beautiful Gospel into something that could be eas-
ily dismissed and understandably disdained.
If I’d been offered this version of Christianity as a nonbelieving
teenager, I’m quite certain I would have remained a pagan.
While the Moral Majority eventually died out, its mindset did
not. The first two elections of the third millennium brought forth
as much divisive religious posturing as anything that happened in
the 1980s or ’90s.
Like most evangelical pastors of megachurches, I received an
unprecedented amount of pressure to “steer the flock” toward re-
electing George Bush in 2004. Most of this came from members
of my own five-thousand-person congregation who were getting
worked up into a political frenzy by Christian leaders on television,
on the radio, on the Internet, and in the mail.
I decided to use the occasion as a teaching opportunity. I would
explain the biblical reasons why our church never has, and never
will, participate in political activity (as well as why we don’t have a
flag on our premises, sing patriotic hymns, celebrate the Fourth of
July, or do other things like that). So I delivered a four-part sermon
series titled “The Cross and the Sword” that spelled out the differ-
ence between the Kingdom of God, which followers of Jesus are
called to promote, and the kingdoms of the world, which politics
concerns itself with.
The messages exposed a division in my congregation that ran
through the entire evangelical community. On the one hand, I’d
never received such positive responses to anything I’d ever preached.
Some people literally wept for joy, feeling that the Gospel had been
hijacked by American politics. On the other hand, roughly a thou-
sand people walked out.2
Looking back, I know I could have been more tactful (never my
strong suit). But the mass exodus also revealed the ongoing fusion
of faith and politics in American evangelicalism — and mine was a
congregation that had always taken care to keep the two separate!
THE KINGDOM
Everywhere Jesus went he proclaimed “the Kingdom of God.” It’s
the thread that connects all his teaching. A kingdom is any area
where a particular king reigns. Literally, it’s the king’s domain. So
the Kingdom of God that Jesus referred to is the domain of God’s
reign. Jesus’ life and teachings focused on revealing what it looks like
when God reigns in a person’s life and in the life of a community.
Jesus didn’t just focus on the Kingdom, however. He was the
Kingdom. According to the New Testament, Jesus was the embodi-
ment of God — he was God Incarnate, to use traditional terminology.
He was, therefore, the very embodiment of the Kingdom of God.
This is one reason why Jesus announced that the Kingdom was
at hand wherever he went. It was at hand, because he was there.
As the embodiment of the Kingdom, Jesus didn’t just reveal
what it looks like. He brought it to us. Through his life, minis-
try, death, and resurrection, Jesus established the Kingdom in this
world. Each time a person submits to God’s reign, the Kingdom
grows a little more. God’s ultimate goal, which he promises to ac-
complish eventually, is for the whole earth to become a domain
over which he lovingly rules.
Our job, as people who submit to God’s reign, is to do every-
thing we can to grow this mustard seed Kingdom in our own lives
and throughout the world. We’re to pray and live in such a way that
we bring about God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Jesus came to plant this Kingdom. Through his Spirit working
in the lives of all who submit themselves to him, he’s expanding it.
This is what Jesus was and is all about. And this is what we who
have pledged our lives to Christ are to be all about. We’re to be the
Kingdom and to be used to expand the Kingdom.
Over the last several years the media has coined the term red-
letter Christians to refer to believers who believe they’re supposed
to obey Jesus’ teaching and live as he lived. (Some Bibles print
Jesus’ words in red — hence the term red letter). What we’ve seen
so far is that there is, in reality, no other kind of Christian. Obey-
ing what Jesus taught and living as he lived is simply what the term
“Christian” means. 3
GIANT JESUS
New Testament writers express the truth that the Kingdom is about
participating in the Life of God by referring to Jesus followers as
“the body of Christ.”
Jesus acquired an ordinary body when he was born in Bethle-
hem, but now he has acquired a collective body with the Church.4
The Church is his hands, mouth, and feet operating in the world
today. The same Life that was in his first body is in us, his second
body. And we who belong to this second body take our marching
orders from the same “head” as Jesus’ first body.
This is why Luke begins his work on the history of the early
church by reminding his readers that in his earlier written Gospel
he “wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day
he was taken up to heaven” (Acts 1:1). To say that Jesus “began”
to do certain things in his incarnate form implies that Jesus is now
continuing to do certain things in a corporate form — through his
Church. In Luke’s mind, his Gospel was about what Jesus did
through his first body, while the book of Acts is about what Jesus
continued to do through his second, corporate body.
In other words, Luke sees the Church as a sort of giant Jesus.
And this giant Jesus is still ministering to the world today.
In the book of Acts you can also see that Jesus identified with
his corporate body. When Jesus knocked Paul off his horse on the
road to Damascus, he identified himself as “Jesus, whom you are
persecuting” (Acts 9:4). Since Jesus had ascended to heaven several
years earlier, how could Paul be persecuting him? Clearly, he was
doing so by persecuting the Church. Jesus apparently considered
whatever happened to the Church as happening to him. Pain in-
flicted on his Church is pain inflicted on his body, as much as when
spikes were driven into his hands and feet on Calvary.
The call to imitate Jesus is not something people are to carry
out by their own efforts. Rather, it’s the call to yield to the Spirit
and thereby manifest the truth that Christ himself is working in
and through us. Christ himself is transforming us into his image.