What if the Gospel is Different, Better and Bigger than We've Been Told?


What if we preached the gospel as the good news it is: That God has defeated all our enemies in Jesus Christ and we are free to be who God created us to be?

What if?

And what if who God created us to be is “royal priests” in his temple of creation mandated and gifted to represent our Great King and extend and prepare the whole creation to be his eternal habitation with us?

What if?

Again, what if being “royal priests” in a defeated but still-not-yet-fully-pacified world entailed God’s people being a “subversive counter-revolutionary movement?” A community of Christ-followers committed to undermining the attitudes, actions, patterns, and systems inscribed by the fall into the world and beginning in Christ to live out the same in accord with the creational design of God which is the world’s future and destiny?

What if?

What if Jesus’ life of pouring himself out for the world in love resulting in the cross and climaxing in the resurrection is the very life of God lived out under the conditions set by human sin and rebellion? That is, what if his call for his followers to “take up the cross” and follow him in pouring themselves out, even to death, for the world is that same life of God, Jesus’ life, lived out under the same conditions as he did? Whose resurrection validated and vindicated his life as that very life of God? The very same life we will live eternally in the new creation forever? The same pouring ourselves out to serve and care for one another we know here sans the conditions generated by sin and rebellion that made the cross inevitable? The eternal life experienced in part here and now and in full then and there?

What if?

What if the church lived as a “subversive counter-revolutionary movement” armed only with the word of God (Eph.6:17) and practicing the “violence of love” (Oscar Romero; see also Gal.5:6)?

What if?

What if we approached every person we meet as a person called to join us as the “royal priests” we are all called to be, welcomed them to our company, and lived together with them the “subversive counter-revolutionary” life which is life indeed not only for this life but for the one to come?

What if?

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