Marginal Christianity

Romans 12:1-2 12  1-2  So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message) Fourth Sunday in Lent Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Last week we looked at the way conformity to our culture hinders our pursuit of faithfully serving God. This week we look at the obstacles in us that hinder that pursuit. T he rigor of the chan...

Friday, 12 April 2013 As a little boy there was a song I loved to sing. I learned it from my mother. She taught it to me and I sang it, and all my life it has replayed inside my mind. Into my heart, into my heart, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus; Come in today, come in to stay, Come into my heart, Lord Jesus. It was (or so I thought in those days) a song about conversion, about getting saved, being born again. A Sinner's Prayer . At Sunday School they were always warning us to make sure we'd invited Jesus into our hearts. In another song I remember from those days, the human heart was compared to a castle where Jesus lives: Joy is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart, For the King is in residence there. It seemed a pretty grand thing, to have Jesus living in your heart. And we always felt sorry for the poor non-Christians, those people who went about like walking ghost towns, their interior houses empty and abandoned. Our most fervent...