What path will you take?

It is comfortableIt is a nice, middle-class, American faith. Jesus is a nice, middle-class, American Jesus.Our faith doesn’t infringe on our comforts.Jesus wants us to be balanced.He cares about our 401(k) and financial planHe wants us to avoid dangerous extremes.He brings us comfort and prosperity as we

live out our Christian spin on the American dream.

One path is easy (or so it appears)

The routine of adversity.The gradual decay of youthful loves and

youthful hopes.The quiet despair of ever overcoming

chronic temptations.The drabness which we create in their lives.The inarticulate resentment with which we

teach them to respond to it.Being knit to the World through a sense of

being really at home on Earth.

Problem is…it doesn’t work

“Virtuous motives, trampled by inertia and timidity, are no match for a fully armed and

resolute wickedness.”

PossessionsControlComfortsRisk avoidance“surely Jesus

didn’t mean..”

The American dream

Prosperity

PossessionsControlComfortsRisk avoidance“surely Jesus

didn’t mean..”

The American dream

Prosperity

Knit me to the world

Losing control What we worship

Shrink back Twist the Gospel

What is the true cost of achieving

that “dream” Can we ever have

“enough” ?

“Perhaps the tragedy of our time is that such an overwhelming number of us who declare Jesus as Lord, have become domesticated – or, if you will, civilized. We have lost the simplicity of our early faith (the abandon, freshness, power, the “I don’t care who knows…”). Beyond that, we have lost the passion and power of that raw, untamed, primal faith.”

Erwin McManus

“We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die upfront and then live.”

Erwin McManus

Why do these images stir us?

Radical, all-in, living for something other than self, no regard for safety, willing to die to free others…

Abandon everything – your needs, your desires, even your family

Challenges the things I am holding onto as my anchor, my foundation, my identity

“Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.”

Sounds a lot different than “admit I’m a sinner, believe Jesus died for me, pray this prayer…”

World preaches “self-preservation” while Jesus is saying “die to self”.

Other path appears tougher…

Luke 9

Matthew 10: 44

Mark 10: 17-25

Next week – read the forward, the prologue and Chapter 1