He really meant it!!!

How much can one person's life change in the course of one weekend? I can now honestly tell you: entirely. I just got back Monday evening from this year's National Youth Worker's Convention in Sacramento, and I think Tic Long put it best when he said that this weekend (and one speaker in particular) left us all feeling...wrecked. After last week, learning that I was in danger of losing my job, I went into the weekend hoping for a fresh word from God. What I was really hoping for was a word of encouragement and something to keep me persevering, what I got was an entirely new way of living and a new way of looking at the scriptures. The story of Jesus is becoming more and more real to me as I consider this one crazy question: "What if e meant what He said?" We hear all these sermons interpreting what Jesus said and what He meant by it, but do we ever really consider that Jesus actually said just what He meant? I was really challenged to believe things this weekend that really made no sense to me, but then it really does make sense when put in the context of Christ. When Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell all his "stuff" and follow Him, he ACTUALLY meant it! How many of us would have gone running after the poor guy with something like "Hey man, if this is too hard why not start with just a little bit" or something like that, but Jesus, even though He loved the man, let him walk away. 

When I got back from the conference, with my new copy of Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution in hand and a fresh (and Seriously Ridiculous) word from God in my heart, I decided it was time to start reading the gospels again. With new eyes I'm reading the words of Jesus and realizing that he really did mean everything he said. He totally meant the whole "turn the other cheek" thing, and not just in schoolyard fights and backhanded compliments, He meant it for bigger things as well. (This is where I really had a head-on collision with Jesus that left me really shaken and reeling) What if we turned the other cheek after September 11, and instead of bombing the heck out of people, we went to where they were and loved them? A lot of us would have died, a lot of us would have been prisoners, but how many would have been saved (in the biblical sense of the word) by an action like that? Jesus really did mean it, both figuratively AND literally when He said "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it" Matthew 16:25. 

I stopped in front of a little display our church has in the entryway for all the troops we have in Iraq and Afghanistan and something struck me. All over the board in different sports was the quote "Freedom isn't Free" and I was totally dumbstruck, because IT IS!!! Jesus gives us freedom so freely, and we don't have to do anything to earn it! Maybe its not free to be safe, but nowhere does Jesus ever call us to be safe, does He? He tells us to give up our very lives, how safe is that?