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Spiritual Discovery blog

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Why Does John the Baptist Tell People to Repent?


In last night's Jesus Class, more than one participant remarked at the way Jesus is introduced by John the Baptist. In the fist place John the Baptist is not marketed well for a successful ministry. He's not in the temple being video cast to multi-sites all over Palestine. Let's just say... he's not in Jerusalem (the center of Jewish spiritual life) he's not in the temple (the center of the center). He's in the wilderness.

He's preaching repentance! Not grace! And people are coming to him from everywhere. It would be like Mark Ashton deciding he'd like to go to a corn field outside Wahoo and deliver his Sunday messages... and people would actually flock to be there! And in response to such a message, people would actually be cut to the heart, repent and be living in expectation of Jesus' arrival.

Could it be we actually need to clean up our life BEFORE meeting Jesus makes any sense? John can't be telling us that we have to get rid of all our sins before we encounter Jesus! Got any thoughts?

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posted by Tim Perry at 8:22 AM 1 Comments

Sunday, August 23, 2009

The Jesus Class - Starting This Tuesday Night!



This week we launch The Jesus Class here at the Old Mill Campus in FLC 154. For eight weeks, participants will gather and meet around tables to peer into the life of the world's greatest spiritual leader. Our text will not be a study guide, or a book about Jesus, or even a video series by a famous scholar or mega-church pastor. The text we're following is Mark's gospel in an unusual format.

You won't need your bibles. Hope that's OK. What you will get is a thing called a manuscript. The pic above gives you some idea of how we'll do this. Everyone attending will receive a complete text manuscript of Mark's gospel biography of Jesus. Each week, we'll dive straight into the world, words and actions of Jesus himself. We'll learn the story line of the Jesus scene by scene. Each week we'll read several pages, have lots of room for questions and first-hand observations. Jesus will come alive, jumping off the page saying and doing the most surprising things.

People who know Jesus well and people who are dying to meet him for real for the first time, will find the Jesus Class an equally rewarding experience. If you want to check it out for a week and see if it fits your interests, you're welcome to try it. If you have a seeking friend and would like to invite them along, you can have them join you at your table. If you've got questions just shoot me a comment and I'll contact you.

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posted by Tim Perry at 4:24 PM 0 Comments

The Biography of Jesus

So if the best way for people to get introduced to Jesus is to let him speak for himself, what does that mean for people seeking spiritual truth? At a minimum it means getting Jesus himself in front of us as the subject. It means setting aside our theories about him and investigating the evidence for him. It means getting as close as we can humanly speaking to his words and actions. What did he tell people? What was their reaction? What decisions did he make about where he went, how he spent his time?

If Christians could show people THAT Jesus, we'd be so much more interesting to people curious about his life. People wouldn't hear our spin on Jesus. They'd hear Jesus himself! No hype. No exaggeration. Everything about him, not what us Christians think others would find interesting. You'd be surprised at how interesting it gets when people actually encounter the Jesus the reporters of his day wrote stories about.

That's what the power of a live story does! The biography of Jesus is nothing less than a running travelogue trying to keep up with the worlds most brilliant spiritual authority. That's what we're trying to capture with the Jesus Class that starts this week at CCC.

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posted by Tim Perry at 3:48 PM 0 Comments

Friday, August 14, 2009

This Can't Be That Hard!

Two things help people meet Jesus more than anything else I've ever seen in my 20+ years of ministry.

1 - Let Jesus speak for himself.
2 - Let people discover him for themselves.

Pretty profound given how much we Christians can knock ourselves out trying to share the Gospel with others. Sometimes I get to thinking, "Maybe we're working too hard at this? Maybe Christ followers today are actually clogging up the connection between people who don't know God, and the Jesus who loves them and is pursuing them already."

Before you check out of this post, ask yourself this question, Christian: "If people need to meet Jesus for themselves, and if Jesus is already pursuing them, what am I supposed to do anyway?"

Many of us so badly want our friend or family member to meet Jesus, that we can come off like an annoying match-maker trying to get people we feel empathy for to meet Mr. Right and fall in love. Trust me, it's just not that complicated.

Don't get me wrong, our role is to introduce people to Jesus. It's the greatest priviledge in the world to do so! The question is, how do we best do that? How can we tap into the kind of joy we feel when we introduce two people we know well... and they actually hit it off on their own without us trying all that hard? Can we really trust people to like Jesus on their own without us trying so hard to sell him? That's what I want to know. Any thoughts?

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posted by Tim Perry at 5:47 AM 1 Comments