Beautiful Mess Part 2.

Here are the highlights from This Beautiful Mess week two.

Jesus wants to make bring a beautiful order to our normal messes AND a beautiful mess to our normal order.

Let the shocking nature of the gospel message SHOCK us. Not like Howard Stern. But the teaching of Jesus is intended to jar us, shift us, mess up our mind. Let him confront our categories, mess up our assumptions. There is a beauty in the mess he makes if we will let him make the mess. We don’t like messes. Incongruity. Tension. We have trouble thinking logically about something we disagree with.

A test was run on people who had strong political positions. Strapped all the brain mechanism to the brain and presented them with facts that contradicted their passionate political convictions. The frontal lobe cortex, the smart, logical part of you began to shut down and the amigdala, the stupid, animal part of you was stimulated. This is why it is so hard to talk calmly and rationally about what we are passionate about. That’s why discussions in this world involve guns. It’s easier to kill than understand.

We get security from hearing what we’ve been taught. When we hear things that are shocking in the gospel we tune it out OR reinterpret, tame it down, sanitize. And we find a Jesus that is saying everything we would want him to say. Great minds think alike, right? It’s easier to hear what I want to hear.

We have to let Jesus mess with our assumptions, categories, conventional wisdom, normalcy. Let him rearrange our normal. There is nothing normal about the Kingdom of God. Aslan is an untamed lion.

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of good literature. – Mohandas Gandhi

Read Matthew 13.

The parable of the sower…the parable of the soils…the parable of where it all starts…because it is the parable Jesus says is foundational to understanding all other parables (Mark 4:13).

The seed sown is the word of God (JOHN 1). We want people to show up here (KAMP's) to receive the seed, not a message about the seed. So much talking about the seed can be dangerous to the life of God’s Kingdom, by making the scriptures appear too challenging for ordinary Christians to read or interpret.

As long as we read books about the Bible and not the Bible itself, the enemy has succeeded in keeping the Kingdom sterile, unhealthy, and weak. He has snatched the seed away before it can ever penetrate our hearts and grow to life and fruitfulness (VERSE 19).

There is no substitute for God’s word; it alone is the seed of His Kingdom. And not in a verse a day keeps the devil away.

What about reading the New Testament in 30 days. You would need to read about 6 chapters each day. Or what about reading the New Testament in the next 90 days. You would only need to read about 3 chapters each day.

There is an ancient practice and tradition of reading and praying the scriptures called the Lectio Divina. Check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_divina.

Understand that it is not religious reading of the Bible that is important, but hearing God’s voice. The scriptures are alive with God’s voice, and the Holy Spirit in us is a special anointing that gives each of us direct access to God’s heart every time we open the Word.

God’s message, truth of God, this truth became flesh and dwelt among us. This is what changes life. At the heart of the kingdom is the message and reality of a King that has come. At the heart of our faith is a God who comes. But Jesus is not the Messiah anybody expected. And we are encourage to be a peculiar people (1 Peter 2). Swim upstream a little bit. That will beautiful.

The seed is sown by us, the church. Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. The Kingdom of God (How Things Really Are) is conceived with the planting of the seed. Planting seed is organic in nature. If we are deceived into thinking that simply getting people to sit in an auditorium one day a week for an hour is what it takes to start a church, we have completely missed the significance of this parable, and God’s Kingdom is not being planted.

The 4 soils…

The first soil, Jesus tells us, is hard and unreceptive. The seed never penetrates the soil’s hard exterior. It reminds of the person walking through life proudly boasting that he or she is agnostic, which comes from the Greek word agnostos which means without knowledge.

The second soil is shallow. Life begins but is not sustained.

The third soil that Jesus mentions is thorn infested. This person is more interested in the riches of the world and the worries that accompany such pursuits.

Blessed are the poor and woe to the rich (LUKE 6:20,24). So you’re saying…
We think blessing equal wealth and wealth equals blessing. We have to let Jesus confront our cultural presuppositions. What Jesus says should call our mantra into question. That we are blessed because we are so rich.

The wealthier we get the more we keep for ourselves. We give a fraction of what we gave in the 1960’s and the gulf between us and third world countries has enlarged 4times.

Riches have not made us happier. Published study by world health org. & Harvard medical school. 9.6 million Americans were clinically depressed. Second highest was Lebanon at 6.6 million. Japan 3.1 million. And the least depressed people, the happiest people on the planet are the Nigerians (most populous country in Africa at 140Million) 0.8% - 1.1Million. Secular study indicated that Americans tend to chase wealth (the blessing) and shortchange relationships

The fourth soil is the good soil. The soil that receives the seed and bears fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, and some a hundredfold. One might find this parable discouraging, as only one out of four soils actually bears fruit. This should give us hope. Why? Because I no longer feel responsible for the fruit, or lack thereof, in the lives of disciples. The Kingdom that this parable helps to describe is not something that we advance, but something we receive and embrace.

Often times the good soil are broken people.

Luke 5:32 - Jesus did not come for the healthy but for the sick.

James 2:5- Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?

Matthew 18:3 - "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 7:7- Desperate - 7"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

1 Cor. 1:26-29 – 26Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29so that no one may boast before him. 30It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."

Luke 5:31-32 – "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

Luke 18:24-24 - 24Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 25Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Jesus had an interesting conversation with his disciples in John 4:27-38.

He had just opened the spiritual eyes of a Samaritan woman with a bad reputation to understand who He truly was. She went back to her village to tell everyone that she had met the Messiah. The entire village poured out to meet Jesus as He was discussing the harvest of souls with His disciples. He said, “lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white with harvest.”

Of course, the Jews of His day would never have imagined that Samaritans would be a good place for the Gospel, Jesus did. He pointed to the multitude of Samaritans flooding out of the village to find the Messiah, ALL DRESSED IN TRADITIONAL WHILE SAMARITAN GARMENTS, and said, “Look, the fields are white for harvest, if you would only begin to look in places you least expect.”

We must begin to look in places where traditionally the church would never go. Finding good soil is not difficult once you get over the fear factor.

What distinguished the good ground was fruitfulness. Christ does not say that this good ground has no stones in it, or no thorns; but none that could hinder its fruitfulness.

Let us look to ourselves that we may know what sort of hearers we are. What kind of soil are we?