What I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career.

What's skills are you developing? Who will you be tomorrow? The harsh fact or, maybe, the encouraging fact is that you will be tomorrow the skills you develop today.

In the movie Taken, Liam Neeson's character, Brian Mills, was a former CIA operative. When he received a phone call from the person who took his daughter hostage, he said in a dark, mysterious, and firm voice, "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you." Brian Mills had skills that I don't have. Skills he acquired over a long career in the CIA. That skill set enabled him to pursue the kidnappers of his daughter and save her.

Although Taken was a fictional story, skills in real life work that way. We can only do things today that we set out to learn and do yesterday. This is a theme that I regularly repeat in these articles because it is something I need reminded of along with it being something that we all need to grasp if things are going to be better tomorrow than they are today.

Nothing is more dangerous than getting caught in a rut and just going through the motions. Our wheels just spin, getting us nowhere. We've all seen this happen to people, churches, communities, and other organizations. When we become comfortable or complacent in our rut, life will just pass us by. We have to strive to be who we want to be because we will never be able to accomplish the dreams we want to accomplish tomorrow unless we work on developing ourselves today into a person who has the skills to do those things tomorrow.

However, this isn't just some pop self-help idea despite being a practical concept useful for businesses or any other organization. On the individual level, many people imprison this idea of working toward a better tomorrow to their financial and personal realms. It becomes only about making a better me. A better me that the world values. We want to work hard and study hard so that we can get a good job that will provide us with nice houses and good vacations. But on the other side of having a good job, nice house, and good vacations is meaninglessness if that is all there is. Those are all good things. I hope that you can all have good jobs, nice houses, and good vacations. And I believe you can if you set out a plan, work toward it, remain disciplined - if that is what God is calling you to.

Which brings me to something more important than creating an environment conducive to bringing us personal pleasure. We need to be faithful servants to God. People who bring His kingdom here to earth as much as possible. Sometimes God calls us to experience Him in ways that aren't immediately perceived as blessings. When that happens, we need to be faithful. Sometimes he calls us away from the good job, the nice house, and the good vacations. Again, when it doesn't make sense, we still need to be faithful because it is more important that we become who God wants us to be rather than invest our time and resources chasing after the fleeting pleasures of this world.

Being who God wants us to be - like the good job, nice house, and good vacations - won't happen by accident. It's something we have to think about. It's something we have to work on. It's something we have to pursue. We might not be saved by works, but we can't be involved in bringing about God's will into this reality unless we work. Unless we get busy doing the things God wants  us to do.

Augustine said, "For grace is given not because we have done good works, but in order that we may be able to do them." Too often, we are only concerned about being saved, but God has saved us for something other than just getting to heaven. It's amazing how when we are faithful to him today, he calls us to do greater things tomorrow. We can be involved in bringing God's will into this broken and fallen reality. Even if heaven were not a reality on the other side of the grave, the life God wants us to live today is far greater than selfishly pursuing the things of this world.

You were saved for something. Are you going to get there? Are you going to realize God's dream for your life, or are you going to miss Him and His plan for you among all the physical things this world throws our way. The distractions. The blessings. The trials. They are all things there to shape us into someone spiritually better than we currently find ourselves. But they will only transform us into someone better if we let them. 

God is not going to force His will on you. You must choose to accept it. You must decide that you are going to invest your time into developing the skills that God will use tomorrow to fix the broken things in this world. To comfort the hurting. To restore justice. To help the oppressed. God's plan for this world is bigger than you or me, but the amazing thing - or should I say the peculiar thing -  about God is that we are in those plans. He is not going to force His will on us. We must choose. We must act. A better tomorrow depends on it.

A Response to "Intro and Question #1: Good News?" - The Struggle of Two Gospels - The Message of Jesus and Paul

A link to another article, Intro and Question #1: Good News?, was posted on my post, What Is Really The Good News Taught By Jesus? - The Gospel Is The Kingdom, and I just never noticed. Today, I began looking through old posts for a class I am teaching, and I saw the link in a comment. The timing of this discovery was great, despite nearly three years after it being written. It appears that Kelvin has since become a missionary in Venezuela to help bring about the Kingdom of God.

These are the thoughts I had while reading the article. They might not be disagreements; they are just my stream of consciousness. The thoughts are written in reply to his article and to him; hence the use of the word "you."

Romans 1-3 (especially when it states that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God) is a proclamation that we can only be saved by grace. When you wrestle with whether we can be righteous or not, that is a different wrestling match than whether we can be saved by our own works or not. The latter is what Paul addressed in Romans when he wrote about us all being sinners. Jesus, at the end of Matthew 19, also touched on it when he was asked by the young man what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus pointed out that salvation was impossible for man yet possible with God. There are no works that we can do to be right with God; it is purely through his grace. As Paul said in Romans 3, God's grace is a gift.

Galatians 3 states that we were initially saved by grace and are continually made right to God by grace. When we think our works are what makes us right, even after we have been a Christian for many years, we run into the problems of pride and losing the blessing of God working among us. God does great things through the willing, not the prideful or "perfect."

You explained the two approaches to the Gospel in the following:

To sum up for side A, I see this as the message of salvation, which is true but not necessarily the gospel. Where I see it falling short is although there is a promise of love, peace, joy and new life, the emphasis is on snatched from Hell, wait for Heaven and don't do anything really bad till you die.

And what of Side B, pray tel? Side B relies heavily upon the life and teachings of Jesus, and not so much His death. After all, Jesus did do much more than just die. He lived: He was a little kid, He was a teenager, He worked, He learned a trade. Before He started His ministry, you probably wouldn't even have given Him a second look. In fact, He wasn't even physically handsome. (Isaiah 53:2). Once He began His ministry, He began with the poor. Many of the people that came to Him were broken, either poor, physically ailed, someone in their family had problems, etc. And, never, never once does Jesus ever turn away someone who is desperate for Him. He does turn away the pride and arrogance of the pharisees. Jesus even forgave sins of the people that came to Him . . . and He had not died yet to forgive them. Jesus preached the Kingdom of God while on Earth, and He said the prostitutes and charlatans were entering before the pharisees. He came to establish the Kingdom and He did. Its not something you can point to and say there it is, or here it is, rather it is within you. (Luke 17:20-21).

I’ve been wrestling with the two approaches toward the Gospel that you address, and I think it is a blending of the two that is true. Jesus is the entry to the Kingdom, but within the Kingdom is where disciples are made. You can substitute the word community for Kingdom, but Kingdom is great, albeit archaic, in that it signifies a community with Jesus as the ruler. The problem with the two gospels you address is that the one is good at making converts but not in shaping disciples. The other is good at shaping disciples but not good at making converts. That does not mean that disciples are not made in the one and converts are not made in the other; it just means that those two Gospels, when purely approached, do not naturally lend themselves to making converts in one case or disciples in the other.

If your goal is to transform the world, then many systems need to be transformed as well. If you are going to bring peace to the world, then wars need to cease; oppressors need to see the slave as their brother, not an object of hatred. If you aim to end poverty, you need to establish a just system of wealth and economics. How does Jesus address these issues? He doesn't.

I could not agree more. The goal of the Gospel is not to transform governments. Although I do believe a nation that consisted of Christians would steer toward being Christian in its policies, but that is not the goal of the Christian. We are focused on our citizenship in God’s Kingdom and the opportunities that being a follower of Jesus entails. In our life and our circle of ministry, we need to strive to bring about peace, justice, and an end to oppression. I am not worried about systems but hearts, mine included. I need to live at peace with those who attack me. I need to make purchasing, employment, and consuming decisions that do not proliferate this economy of oppression that we live in (and I am terrible at this). I need to live my life in such a way, along with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, that we are an adequate representation of the body of Christ.

The body of Christ is such an amazing analogy. That means Christ is our head, but we are the body. The head sends us signals, and we are to do them. We are his hands and feet in the world. We bring about his will. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I think we do a disservice when we get this message confused with political activism rather than on the street love. I am not going to make a legalistic rule that there is never a place for political activism. I know that is not what I am called to. If someone else is called to political activism, who am I to say that they were not really called to that.

Transformation or peace corps can look the same.

I could not agree more. That is why we need to make sure that our transformative actions are rooted and expressed in and through Jesus. Many loving things can be done because of our love of Jesus, but we need to make sure that Jesus is proclaimed through our loving actions. Hmmm…I might even disagree with what I just wrote. Because if I love to just transform others’ hearts, then that love is manipulative. I need to make sure the love I express is an overflowing of the love that God has for me. It is not manipulative, despite proclaiming Jesus, because it is an overflowing of God’s love through me.

The Gospel that the Galatians had strayed from was a Gospel that included grace. As I previously mentioned, they were trying to say that works made a person right with God. Grace was the key omission of the Gospel in the case of the Galatians.

I think you wisely discern a difference between the Gospel Jesus taught to the Jews and the Gospel Paul preached to the Gentiles. The Kingdom analogy only works when one has a good grasp of the Old Testament Kingdom and God’s transition of that Kingdom from one of the nation of Israel to Cross-Nation Kingdom of people whose hearts are surrendered to God. In one sense, the Kingdom really is useless as a message to the non-Jew. However, it is still the concept that Jesus taught. To his audience, it was easily understood. The Jews were waiting for that new Kingdom to be ushered in by the Messiah. Jesus was at work transitioning the Old Testament Kingdom into a new Kingdom that had no partialities, hierarchies of leadership, boundaries, and concern in regard to the economic and political standing of the people that are part of it.

In the end, the key is that people surrender their hearts to God. The rest will fall into place after that. Although useful, whether a person understands the teaching of the Kingdom does not really matter. Teaching about the Kingdom is beneficial in that it focuses on us being a community under the King along with having a citizenship that is higher than our earthly citizenship. We are in relation to one another; that is an essential part of following Jesus. Too often, the gospel of just giving your life to Jesus for eternal salvation never really entails being part of the fellowship of believers. Teaching the Kingdom inevitably emphasizes that. Also, we must never compromise the Kingdom for our earthly nation. That is also an inevitable teaching of the Kingdom.

In the end, I find myself somewhere between a social gospel and a gospel of personal salvation. It is still working itself out. Thanks for your thoughts.