Repentance Means to Accept Being Found

An assignment I gave the students in a 2-week intensive course that I just completed was that they work in groups to rewrite Jesus' parable about the lost son (what we call the prodigal son). I was deeply moved by their work and freshly reminded of what an amazing story this is of the nature of our heavenly Father.

Even by those who don't claim to be "Christian", this story is considered to be the greatest story that's been told. It is our story, the story of each of us; it is the gospel story. In his book The Cross and the Prodigal, Kenneth Bailey says this of the father in the story:

"Traditional Western interpretation has said that the father interrupted the son and didn't give him a chance to finish his speech. Rather, faced with the incredible event (of his father's stunning display of love by shamelessly running bare-legged towards him), he is flooded with the awareness that his real sin is not the lost money but rather the wounded heart. 

The reality and the enormity of his sin and the resulting intensity of his father's suffering overwhelm him. In a flash of awareness he now knows that there is nothing he can do to make up for what he has done. His proposed offer to work as a servant now seems blasphemous. He is not interrupted. He changes his mind and accepts being found. In this manner he fulfills the definition of repentance that Jesus sets forth in the parable of the lost sheep. Like the lost sheep, the prodigal now accepts to be found."

What if God were really this good (with none of the qualifiers that we add)?? Think about it and be in wonder...

We Have Been the Real Reductionists...

More words from other Jesus followers to challenge us to understand God more:

N.T. Wright (Simply Jesus):
"Jesus - the Jesus we might discover if we really looked is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide behind other questions and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of Jesus's central claim and achievement. It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety; the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience; Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself."

Albert Nolan (Jesus Today):
"Jesus' respect for the dignity of everyone he encountered was boundless. He treated each individual as unique and lovable - whether that person was a blind beggar, an epileptic, or a Roman centurion. He was particularly attentive to the needs of women and children: the widow of Nain who had lost her only son, the poor widow who put her last coin into the collection box, the woman suffering from hemorrhages, the women of Jerusalem who, he says, should weep for themselves and their children rather than for him, and, anticipating the day when the Roman armies will attack, the focus of his attention is on children, pregnant mothers, and those with babies at the breast..."

George MacDonald:
"How terribly have the theologians misrepresented God's character. They represented him as a king on a huge throne, thinking how grand he is and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain...

But how contrary this is to what the Gospel accounts plainly tell us. Brothers, sisters, have you found our King? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at the table with the head of the fisherman lying on his chest and (with) somewhat heavy heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well."

God is Different than We Think

More quotes to lead us to fuller understanding of our God:

Greg Boyd:
"God is different than we think.  The revelation of “[a] God humiliated even unto the cross,” as Pascal put it, flies in the face of what most Jews of Jesus’ time, and of what most people throughout history, have expected God to be. For example, few people in Jesus’ day would have expected God to “justify” a tax collector who was too ashamed to “even look up to heaven” (Lk 18) instead of the righteous Pharisee who fasted twice a week, gave a tenth of all he earned... Similarly, few if any expected God to welcome into his kingdom “tax collectors and prostitutes” before religious leaders whom everyone held in high esteem (Mt 21:31; cf., Lk 7:38-50). Indeed, because the God he revealed was so contrary to what people expected, Jesus repeatedly taught that those whom most assumed were “outsiders” would find themselves “inside,” while those whom most assumed were “insiders” would find themselves “out” (e.g., Mt 7:21-3; 22:1-9; 25:31-46)..."


Brian Zahnd (Beauty Will Save the World):
"Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ. We do this best, not by protest or political action, but by enacting a beautiful presence within the world. The Western church has had four centuries of viewing salvation in a mechanistic manner, presenting it as a plan, system or formula. It would be much better if we would return to viewing salvation as a song we sing. The book of Revelation...doesn’t have any plans or formulas, but it has lots of songs. The task of the church is to creatively and faithfully sing the songs of the Lamb in the midst of a world founded upon the beastly principles of greed, decadence, and violence. What is needed is not an ugly protest, but a beautiful song; not a pragmatic system, but a transcendent symphony. Why? Because God is more like a musician than a manager, more like an composer than a clerk keeping ledgers."

The Power of Powerlessness

Continuing the series of quotes this month with the prayer that they will help awaken desire to grow and change in our understanding of God in Christ Jesus:

Doug Frank (A Gentler God): 
"In the most brutal episodes of human history, God has been present - not in power, the kind that we understand or reach for, but as the humble whisper of love into the hearts both of the butchers and the butchered...If God cannot straightforwardly micromanage human events so as to rescue the abused child, the tortured prisoner, the cancer victim, neither can God rescue God's very own self incarnated in Jesus...There is a kind of power in God's whispers. But it is the power of powerlessness. It changes things, but invisibly, unpredictably, unaccountably and, from our point of view, unreliably. It is not the kind of power we imagine, or wish, God to have."

Kenneth Bailey (The Cross and the Prodigal):
Luke 15:1-3 "The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, 'This man receives sinners and eats with them.' In this verse we have (the word) prosdechomai which means 'to welcome into fellowship.' ...The crowning blow was that Jesus ate with them. In the eyes of his opponents Jesus was defiled by such contact. But there was more! To eat with another person in the Mideast is a sacramental act signifying acceptance on a very deep level."

T.A.Sparks:
"A true knowledge of the Lord Jesus will reverse a good many of our ideas, and a good many of our procedures."  



 

"Sometimes It Seems God Loves Us Too Much..."

For some weeks I will be sharing quotes from various followers of Jesus that I pray will inspire us to desire God more. Today I will share two quotes:

Michael Spencer from his book Mere Churchianity:

"We don't see that the powerful change that happens in the life of a disciple never comes from the disciples working hard at doing anything. They come from arriving at a place where Jesus is everything, and we are simply overwhelmed with the gift. Sometimes it seems as if God loves us too much. His love goes far beyond our ability to stop being moral, religious , obedient, and victorious and we just collapse in his arms."



A.W.Tozer:

"How good it would be if we could learn that God is easy to live with. He remembers our frame and knows that we are dust. He may sometimes chasten us, it is true, but even this He does with a smile, the proud tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is. Some of us are religiously jumpy and self-conscious because we know that God sees our every thought and is acquainted with all our ways. We need not be. God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still."