"Repent for the Kingdom of heaven has come near" Matthew 4:17

• "He put before them another parable: 'The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field.'" (Matthew 13:24)

• "'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.'" (Matthew 13:31)

•  "'To what should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."' (Luke 13:20-21)

• "'appearing to [the disciples] during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.'" (Acts 1:3)

"If I had been asked, fresh out of seminary, "What is the gospel of Jesus? I would have said, without hesitation, "Jesus died for our sins so that we can go to heaven when we die." . . . I still believe this today. The gospel--which literally means 'the good news'--of Christianity certainly contains this message ... What I later discovered was that there is even more good news." (Chapter 2, The Good and Beautiful Life)

It's not about you. It's about what interests you.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Nor do you need 3 hours a day. Yep, and you also don't need to be the coolest person on planet earth! But you do need to get the "why to blog" right.

You should feel a call from God to plant some new thoughts, give away some help, and jump in on some conversations with people you might not know right now. You should view it as an adventure -- not as "one more thing I've got to do to be 'successful.'" In other words, the source of your desire should be more than "I should do it because everyone else is doing it."

It should be all about what you can add value for others. "The others" may be a group of friends who want to stay connected about their personal lives, or it could be a group of musicians who play together on Sunday mornings and want to have a feedback place to write music together.

Anne Jackson nailed it.

Driving by my old church, my old Starbucks, my old house…all these things brought back so many memories. Every time I’d go somewhere public, my heart would race a little bit. I was afraid of running into the person who hurt me four years ago.

Four years..it seems like a lifetime ago. But the hurt still hasn’t gone away. And it’s still impacts me, my ministry, and my ability to take risks. I don’t assert myself like I normally did. I stay really quiet and don’t speak my mind as much as I should. I choose my battles too carefully.

I'm also afraid at times of "selling out." It seems that people with ideas are not always welcomed. And it seems that "we work in a business where Jesus is not always popular" - not even in the church! And, it seems, that my ideas need refining --even sometimes when I'm absolutely sure at the time that we NEED to move forward! (And even when I'm sure people are putting artificial and ungodly obstacles up.) I've seen church become an "us" and "them." It's not pretty.

Ah, but we're just like "them," really. Believe me, I'm not on my high horse here. But we do tend to retreat into guarding ourselves and not being as daring as we ought, right? Maybe I'm just speaking for Anne and myself. Perhaps that's a "whole church" problem and not simply a leadership issue? Don't "people in the pews" also hold back from risking beyond where they are?

How do we move beyond that "let's protect ourselves and hold back" syndrome? For me, it's moments like reading Anne's confession and remembering that the people of God can't afford to "hold back" anything. Too much is at stake. After all, the world's acceptance is not what Jesus was about either. I'm so glad that He didn't "hold back."

More than that ... like Jesus, I believe we need to practice what we preach, i.e. get into an active prayer time, tell God what you fear most, and allow God to deal with the places where we need healing and to forgive, as well as forgiveness. Remember the Garden of Gethsemane: "take this cup from me?"Fortunately, we are on a different path with Jesus.

It's not an easy path. But it's the right path, I believe. 

There's a great youtube video that tells the bigger Gospel story in a better way than most churches or Christians have done in the past. I believe God is up to something new so that Christians can share His story!

Here's the Gospel:

• The world was created for goodness - in people, in creation, in relationships, in wholeness. God created and still directs that world
• We did not follow God's blueprint for goodness and the official word for that is "sin." Something's messed up because we see war, bad relationships, pandemics, and creation being destroyed in many ways. Our choices have separated us from a perfect world realized, and it has separated us from a perfect relationship with God as well.
• God loves us so much that God entered our world in Jesus. God did not and has not left us alone to all of this crap we've created.
•  Jesus is not a simple character in a fiction novel. He came to restore the places we've gone wrong. He could only do that as someone who was actually God here with us.
• Jesus brought genuine goodness and showed us again how to follow the blueprint. Our future history depends upon our obedience and following Jesus.
• Jesus asks us to be part of a sacred revolution for healing across the world. We are sent together to heal.
• We need Jesus' resources to overcome huge problems. He gives us God-given power in the Holy Spirit to help us see and feel, to heal and to restore a world gone wrong, and to live differently. First, we need Jesus to do all of that, and second, we need each other.
• Heaven is both a present and future reality when we meet Jesus in this world for healing and restoration.
• One day, God's blueprints (for a perfect world, relationships and communities) will be reality again.

This is to say that our understanding of God ("theology") is widened from too rote a saying on who Jesus is or the reasons for His coming. Our understanding of God is derived from the whole span of the scriptures in both the Old and New Testaments. Any attempt to "concentrate" that into a few sayings is always risky. In the past, we have tried to get it down to one scripture or "a Roman's Road" or one experience. And perhaps in doing so, we have been part of the problem in why people don't understand Jesus?

For those who love theological words, in our zeal for evangelical or liberal calculations, have we lost Jesus? We need a picture that encompasses more - both the forensic and therapeutic nature of salvation. Forensic salvation is about being made right when there has been wrong, as in a legal court with Jesus as our Defense Attorney. Therapeutic salvation refers to the healing nature and becoming whole again as Jesus walks through our life. Both are important parts of the covenant community God established with the creation of the world into our day and age.

We also need a picture across the two planes in which we live, in God, intersected and entwined lives: the vertical plane with God and the horizontal plane with people/earth/animals.

We want to witness to this amazing God who can do all of the above and loves us to the point of death AND resurrection.