This is almost always the by-product of expanding the table: God is right-sized. Rarely, if ever, do you do the work of hospitality, authenticity, diversity, and agenda-free relationships and encounter a smaller, more selective God.
— John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table, p. 149
Photo: Skyline Drive, Virginia, October 14, 2020
The overall testimony of scripture is that God is the Father of all humanity. God’s love for everyone is expressed in the sending of Christ who told us that God is like the prodigal son’s father who never stopped loving his child, even when he lived a life of rebellion and tried to run as far away from him as possible.
God never disowns us. God never stops being our Father. We never stop being children of God. Even on our worst day, God’s love for us is based on who God is, not on who we are, or what we do.
Yes, we can reflect our sonship or daughterhood more clearly whenever we love others, serve others or forgive others. But, even if we fail to do this, it doesn’t change the fact that God is our Father, and that we are loved and forgiven. Based on our behavior, it may appear that our father is the devil, at times. But this is not the reality. It is a perversion of the reality. God is our Father, and we are all His children. If we reflect the character of Christ, then we are starting to look like our Father more and more. This is the way it’s supposed to work.
— Keith Giles, Jesus Undefeated, p. 111
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 8, 2020
It is not God who is violent. We are.
It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do.
God does not need or want suffering — neither in Jesus nor in us.
Most of us are still programmed to read the Scriptures according to the common laws of jurisprudence, which are hardly ever based on restorative justice. (Even the term was not common till recently.) Restorative justice was the amazing discovery of the Jewish prophets, in which Yahweh punished Israel by loving them even more! (Ezekiel 16:53ff.). Jurisprudence has its important place in human society, but it cannot be transferred to the divine mind. It cannot guide us inside the realm of infinite love or infinite anything. A worldview of weighing and counting is utterly insufficient once you fall into the ocean of mercy.
— Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, p. 146-147
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 30, 2018
When it comes to removing barriers between people or between people and God, we as the body of Christ should be on the very front lines. We should be leading the charge. We should be defining the movement of equality and justice, not bringing up the rear and definitely not digging in our heels and fighting against it with all that we have. That simply doesn’t glorify God, and it isn’t making disciples either. The world is seeing this and rejecting it. I hear their stories every single day. The name Christian is no longer synonymous with Jesus out in the world, but with bigotry, with power, with discrimination. This is the script that we who desire the bigger table must flip.
— John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table, p. 140
Photo: View from Skyline Drive, October 13, 2020
What do we notice about Jesus? Does He, as God in the flesh, avert his gaze when surrounded by sinners? Is Jesus too holy to look upon sin or to be in the presence of sinners? Hardly! Instead, those sinners are his closest friends. He spends so much time with them that the religious elite — who, by the way, were too holy to spend time with sinners — openly criticized him for it.
“The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'” (Luke 7:34)
So, is God really “too holy to look on our sin”? Absolutely not! In fact, if God was too holy to look upon our sins, then God would never be able to look at anyone or see anything. Instead, we see time and again that God’s eyes are always upon us, and that we cannot go anywhere to escape God’s presence, even if we were to descend into the depths of hell (Sheol) itself.
— Keith Giles, Jesus Undefeated, p. 79-80
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 24, 2020
This identification extends to all, including those we might consider “the least” — least healthy, least wealthy, least moral, least innocent, etc. God’s heart for the poorest in every category is not an application of the gospel. It’s intrinsic to it. We don’t see Christ in the “least of these” because they’ve chosen to follow him, but because in his Incarnation, Christ identified with the plight of every man, woman and child on the planet.
— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike Way, p. 222
Photo: Skyline Drive Overlook, October 14, 2020
The Franciscans, however, led by John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), refused to see the Incarnation, and its final denouement on the cross, as a mere reaction to sin. Instead, they claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God’s part. In so doing, they reversed the engines of almost all world religion up to that point, which assumed we had to spill blood to get to a distant and demanding God. On the cross, the Franciscan school believed, God was “spilling blood” to reach out to us! This is a sea change in consciousness. The cross, instead of being a transaction, was seen as a dramatic demonstration of God’s outpouring love, meant to utterly shock the heart and turn it back toward trust and love of the Creator.
In the Franciscan school, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God’s own creation for its failures. Love cannot be bought by some “necessary sacrifice”; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects. Try loving your spouse or children that way, and see where it gets you. Scotus and his followers were committed to protecting the absolute freedom and love of God. If forgiveness needs to be bought or paid for, then it is not authentic forgiveness at all, which must be a free letting go.
— Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, p. 143-144
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 18, 2014
In fact, Jesus tells his disciples to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies specifically because this is what God does to His own enemies. So, when we love our enemies, we are like God who sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. (See Matt. 5:45)
Jesus also shows us an “Abba” who, like the father of the prodigal son, goes out of his way to seek out his children; to embrace them, forgive them, and extend mercy to them, and who does not require punishment before extending this love to us.
Taking these facts into account, I find it highly unlikely that Jesus would have accepted the new teaching of Eternal Suffering, as the Pharisees had done. It seems far outside of his character to have embraced such a doctrine, especially in light of the merciful, patient, and loving God he revealed to us.
— Keith Giles, Jesus Undefeated, p. 77-78
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 2, 2020.
When we deny the reality of our experiences, we don’t become more of who God designed us to be, but less. There’s no way to have cohesive stories until we truly embrace all of it: the good, the hard, the bittersweet, the sad, the joyful, the lonely, and the painful. It all counts.
If we know something else to be true, it’s this: God is a curator and keeper of stories. Psalm 56:8 says, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. you have recorded each one in your book” (NLT). God is invested in the entire arc of our humanity. He made us this way, and it’s no accident that our physiology connects with his design. Learning how to be “with” our stories — in our bodies, without becoming overwhelmed by or numbing our past experiences — is the way we will learn how to actually handle and move through the grief and anxiety that come up. It’s also the way we will learn to write new endings that are true to ourselves.
— Aundi Kolber, Try Softer, p. 16
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, September 20, 2020
So is the blood of Jesus precious? Yes. Of course! But it is more precious than most of us have ever realized. The blood of Jesus did not pay some sort of debt in the divine bank account for our sin. No, God had already taken care of that through His gracious forgiveness from all eternity. The blood of Jesus is precious because it reveals to us the most important truth of all, which is a truth we could never have seen or understood on our own. The blood of Jesus reveals to us that God does not want or demand blood sacrifice, but that we want and demand it. We require blood to alleviate our own guilt and solve our own problems. But by coming and dying as a scapegoat on the cross, and then rising again and refusing to retaliate, Jesus revealed that there is a different way. Jesus revealed the way of God, which is the way of forgiveness.
While sacrificial violence does bring a temporary peace, it comes at the price of the life of another. Forgiveness, however, brings a better and more lasting peace and one that does not require us to take the life of another, but invites us to unite in love and harmony with one another, just as God in Christ unites with us. How thankful we can be that Jesus suffered and died at our hands and for our bloodthirsty desires, to reveal to us that we do not have to live this way any longer. Like God, we too can love; we too can forgive. Only in this way will the world finally find peace.
Nothing else reveals our sin to us like the violent death of Jesus on the cross. All other sacrificial and scapegoat victims we could justify. They deserved it. They truly were guilty. We were just treating them the way they treated us. But not so with Jesus. He was “sinless” and knew no sin, but we killed Him in God’s name anyway, thereby proving that this is also what we do to others when we feel justified and righteous in killing them. Only the innocent blood of the Lamb of God could reveal this to us and also call us to put an end to it through forgiveness. For of all victims throughout history, only Jesus would have been justified in retaliation and vengeance against those who wrongfully accused and killed Him. But instead He forgave us. This shows that we too can forgive others. We can forgive as we have been forgiven. We can love as we have been loved. The way out of sin is to see how Jesus dealt with our sin against Him. Nothing and nobody else could have so clearly revealed this to us.
— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 264-265
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, September 12, 2020