A magazine asked me a question.
How do you get to heaven?
Please answer in 75 words or less.
"Without music life would be a mistake." -Friedrich Nietzsche
I love music. I'm a music nut. My life has a soundtrack. I listen to music everyday. Lots of it.
Here are my top ten favorite albums from the last two years (April 2006 -- April 2008).
Thinking out loud.
Sitting on my deck thinking. Thinking.
What am I?
A human being?
Yes. But what more can be said?
A pastor?
This is what I
do, but not really what I
am.
To cease vocation is not to cease being.
What are you?
A human too.
A Christian?
Perhaps, but that reflects a religious choice.
Can we come closer to the essence of being?
Can we be more basic?
What are you?
Christ in you the hope of glory.
Colossians Chaper One, Verse Twenty-Seven.
Seven words. All but one monosyllabic. Simple. But what does it mean?
CHRIST...YOU...HOPE...GLORY
I keep copies of two historic
Time magazines in my study.
One is the famous 1966
Time asking the question:
Is God Dead?
The other is from 1971 reporting on:
The Jesus Revolution
Following up on my
Revival? blog, here are some thoughts on the Jesus Movement.
Modernity's 300 year Enlightenment Project ended badly. Not only did it result in the abandonment of Utopian dreams brought on by the Holocaust and Hiroshima, it also inserted Nietzsche's assertion that
God is dead into the postmodern world, at least in the form of a question:
Is God dead? In keeping with what Nietzsche was really saying, the question is intuitively understood in the postmodern Western world as --
Is Christianity still relevant?
The Jesus Movement was the answer.
April 8, 1966:
Is God Dead?
June 21, 1971:
The Jesus Revolution
The Jesus Movement was the first postmodern revival and as such is a kind of prototype for what I've taken to calling
unrevival.
I've been thinking on my "thinking day." Thinking about...
Revival.
For evangelicals it’s a powerful and evocative word. It can almost cast a spell upon us. It conjures images of great days gone by and elicits the hope that perhaps it could happen again. You know, the second coming of Charles Finney and the ghost of D.L. Moody. If the word
revival is spoken in the right way and in the right setting it can cause Christians to get a faraway look in their eyes and a pang in their soul. Especially if we happen to be living in a time when it is generally assumed the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
(A hand basket? Why a hand basket? Well, that’s what they say.)
I’ve been fascinated with revival ever since my conversion in 1974. It was during the height of the Jesus Movement and since I already had strong counterculture sympathies I promptly became the school Jesus freak. Overnight I went from Led Zeppelin to Larry Norman, started carrying a bible to school and traded my Erich von Daniken books for the writings of Watchman Nee. Pretty soon I was conducting bible studies almost every night of the week and helping lead a Christian coffeehouse. Then through the personal influence of Keith Green and Leonard Ravenhill I became student of historical revival and a seeker of contemporary revival for my own generation.
Actually the Jesus Movement was a revival -- a new kind of revival. It was not a geographically centered revival but a demographic revival located among the youth counterculture, though few evangelicals were able to recognize it as a revival at the time.
This is another blog that is actually a letter. I was in conversation with an important Christian leader and I had asked him this question: "Why did Jesus come?" He answered, "So we can go to heaven when we die." I told him this was the wrong answer and explained the true purpose of the Incarnation and the true nature of salvation. A short time later he asked me to to put what I had said to him in writing so that he could preach on it. The following is my reply. It is by no means a full treatment of the subject, but the "notes" of what I said during our conversation:
Why did Jesus come? The answer is not, "so we can go to heaven when we die."
The problem with saying that Jesus came so that we can go to heaven when we die is that it diminishes the full scope of salvation and misunderstands the purpose of humanity.
God created man from the dust of the earth, breathed into him the breath of life and in this act man became the creature that is uniquely human. (Genesis 2:7)
Animals are physical creatures (dust of the earth) while angels are spirit beings (breath of God), but humans are neither animals nor angels. Humans are a hybrid creature suited for both the heavens (spiritual dimension) and the earth (physical dimension).
(Click here for larger version)
Peri took this close-up of a mosaic in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
I hope you can be with us for Good Friday and Easter Sunday at Word of Life Church.
Good Friday: 7:30 p.m.
Easter Sunday: 9 and 11 a.m.
