Life on God's Terms

"The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict half-built towers. The ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ's warning and undertake to follow Him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so called nominal Christianity. In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent but thin veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism," -John Stott

Today I listened to the second week in the radical series and again was completely challenged by the message. David Pratt started off with a question asking "Have you ever really lived on Jesus's terms?" When I ask myself this question I think well yes I'm a christian I go to church, I pray, I serve the poor but then as we started to dive into the text and I began to be challenged by those same passages from last week (Luke 14: 25-35), I began to see I may never have let go enough to truly live on His terms. Unless you hate your mother and father... you cannot be my disciple. I have never really been able to fully wrap my brain around this scripture. To hate them....it just doesn't make sense to my head. I know God also says the greatest commandment is to love God and then to love my neighbor, so how can I do both? Love my neighbor and hate them. The idea was presented in this talk, that our love for God must be so supreme, so elevated above all other love, that our love for those around us looks like hate in comparison. I had to pause the and think on this for a minute, but after it settled in a way it does make sense to me. I must love God so incredibly much and then from that love stems everything else including my love for my neighbor but this is nothing absolutely nothing compared to my love for God. So as I thought about how much love this takes for God and how much love He deserves I feel like I completely fall short. Do I love him or do I love the idea of heaven and the security of having a God. I think this next week I am going to focus on God just simply Him and who He is and let myself work at deepening this love because in the end that is the greatest commandment and all that really matters, everything else will stem from that. I am going to love Him like crazy so that living life on His terms doesn't seem like a sacrifice it feels like a reward even when it does get uncomfortable.