Saying too much...

I preach. The pulpit the church gives me is an amazing privilege and I'm glad and honored to fill that role, but... every once in a while it freaks me right out. There's such a huge gap between what I say from the pulpit and what I do with my life. That gap was very apparent to me last Sunday, and that feeling of freaked-outedness hasn't really left me since. I said the following:

Our imaginations, and therefore the overall directions of our lives, are captured by this culture and not by the kingdom of God. We’ve reduced the good news of the kingdom of god to a private, inner, individualistic matter which consists mostly of incanting anemic souls into heaven. We have little or no idea how our allegiance to the crucified lamb should shape our response to the issues this world we are ambassadors to faces. Because we’ve allowed our faith to become private, inner, and individualistic, we can’t envision a specifically christian response to global issues such as famine, or terrorism, or economic injustice, or state sanctioned torture.

When is the last time you heard a christian leader issue a call to send teams of Christians into Darfur or Iraq to witness to the peace of Christ by exposing evil and putting themselves into harm’s way for the sake of the least of these whom God loves? Our first response as evangelicals is to go running to the government and we say “oh thou government, with thy big guns and thy big money and thy big industry, go do something about this” or perhaps we do go ourselves with the big guns and the big money of the powers that be, but we don’t go in the weakness and the foolishness of the cross, which is stronger than the power of the world and wiser than the wisdom of man. Why? Because we’ve limited our faith to something only inner and private and individualistic, and therefore have allowed our imaginations to be taken captive by the world and its ways.

But think of it: who are we ambassadors of? He is The king of kings and the lord of lords. He is the alpha and the omega, the one who was and who is and who is to come, and he is the one who is at work even now preparing the way for His kingdom to irrupt into history. There is not a square inch of creation over which he does not cry, “This is mine!” There is not a person in all creation whom he is not pursuing, headlong and lovesick, aching to reconcile them to himself by the blood of his Son shed for that person. All relationships between humans, on all levels, inter-personal and international, all relationships between humans and the land, and of course all image bearers in relationship with the Creator; there is not a single aspect of reality which he does not intend to set shalom loose on.

See why I'm in trouble? Too much big talk, too little action.