This is my God

If only. If only you knew my God!
The thing is you think you know Him; He’s the Christian God, the one who loves churches, organs, hymn books, being well behaved, and hates sex, rule breakers and modern technology. But in fact you’ve got the wrong guy.
My God loves crazy risk takers, sinners, bad singing and dad-dancing, disorganisation, parties, science, he even loves Richard Dawkins!
In the same way people seem to have the wrong idea about the Christian message. The Bible can be read in many ways, but I believe that the Christians I share life with are getting to grips with the right way of understanding the Gospel. Jesus was not concerned with whether people followed religious rules; he had much more pressing priorities. Jesus came to fulfil the prophecy foretold in Isaiah 61:1-2: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners”. Jesus declares this in Luke 4:18-19, but not only does he just open a scroll and read out this historical message, he goes out into the towns and villages and does just as it says. He tells the poor they can have riches, he releases people from their burdens of sin and heals the sick; making the lame walk, the blind see, and even the dead rise. On top of this he tramples upon the Jewish rituals he was brought up to respect; he works on the Sabbath, comes into contact with those deemed unclean and sees no need for animal sacrifices.
Jesus’ message? Forget trying to please God, he’s not impressed with piety and fake politeness. Go and find the people who are so sick and sinful that they are unable to repay you. Find the people who don’t value your kindness and be compassionate to them anyway. Turn culture on its head and pray for your enemies instead of punish them. Sit down on the street with that homeless woman rather than trying to bring her up to your ‘ever so desirable’ social level. Understand the criminal’s motives rather than condemning his actions. Invite the deviant to sit with your friends instead of locking them away and deeming them unacceptable.
Do you get it? With Jesus there’s no one you cannot love. If we fully understood God’s love and loved like Jesus does, we’d never be able to walk down a street without being compelled to sit down with the beggar or lay hands on the woman with a walking stick! The only thing that would ever get done would be the Kingdom. And bingo – we’ve got it!
The Kingdom is not some future ideal dreamt up by religious leaders as a carrot on a string for Christians desperate to see fruitfulness. The Kingdom is in fact at your fingertips. Jesus told us exactly what to do, he didn’t leave us guessing, he wants to see the Kingdom come so much he laid it out plain and simple for us simpletons to understand. You want to see the Kingdom? Believe in your God-given authority over the darkness of this world - then love people! Surely it’s got to be more complicated than that? No. Sorry. Just love. Think about it, if everyone showed love to everyone else, this world would be a lot less broken. I know what you’re thinking, but maybe Jesus was a bit of a hippy (if you ask me that’s much more desirable than some other things he has been labelled as).
Scrap religious language, spiritual eliteness and deep philosophical quandaries, the Christian message is in fact a whole lot less mystical and delusional than some make out. Love is the resolve of evil. There are two ‘kingdoms’; God and Darkness. Plainly, there is good and bad, and if everyone always chose good over bad then we’d see a dramatic transformative effect upon our world. We know that as soon as people start to talk like this they are laughed at. For the new atheists of our time, thinking that love and faith will save this messed up rock hurtling meaninglessly through space is an absurdity, believed in only by the unintelligent and unthinking. But this is only because the culture we have grown up in has conditioned us to think we are all beyond help; that those too dysfunctional for society should be locked away for life or just put on death row. But spare a little faith! Try believing that we are all capable of being saved and the future prospect of this globe will start to look a little sunnier.