I want God to ignite my words with a match made in Heaven so that they burn in the heart of everyone who reads them or hears them, making them a furnace that spreads God’s warmth and light around the world.
The complexion deception is a popular misconception that says that skin color makes people different. The truth is, all humans are basically the same, but we have different faces so that people can tell us apart.
In history The color of skin Was used as A razor thin Excuse For abuse.
What you think about people in a different color of skin than you is what you’d think of Jesus if He was in that skin. We’re all created equal and skin has nothing to do with it!
Manipulation is a sign of counterfeit Christianity. Coercive Christianity is aversive to voluntary surrender to the living Jesus Christ.The freedom to think creatively can never be taken away, but it’s often freely surrendered.
Church, by its nature, is coercive. It demands silence, passivity, and submission to its programs, from those in attendance.
The living Jesus doesn’t need a religious program, intermediary, or organization in order to interact with you.Jesus said “Make disciples,” not “Train people to hear a weekly sermon for the rest of their life.”
People who are pushed into church don’t have much joy. People who eagerly jump into obeying the living Jesus overflow with joy.
People with closed hearts have only superficial connections with other people.It’s better to have a deep heart than a deep pocket. Heart-felt connections make people happier than just accumulating money.
When Christianity is merged into an organizational structure, it loses most of it’s freedom, spontaneity, and supernatural power.The mistranslation of ekklesia as church is a big deal. That’s because it makes people think that today’s religious organizations are sanctioned by the Bible.
People are divided about Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT advocates want to criticize the bad things in history, while CRT opponents want to embrace the good things from the past. Perhaps there’s a more balanced approach.
We need Critical/Embrace Theory. Let’s embrace the noble things in our history and criticize the abusive.
Even a casual observation reveals that American history isn’t “either or.” America was established on both human rights principles and human rights violations. It boldly, courageously, and gloriously proclaimed freedom, all the while sanctioning and utilizing human trafficking to clear it’s land, raise its crops, and build it’s infrastructure.
America’s Founding Fathers were passionate about the principles of freedom, but possessive and protective of their ability to enslave and traffic other people. They declared that “all men are created equal” while they forcibly held (or legally supported those who did) innocent men, women, and children in forced, life-long servitude and bondage.
An honest look at history reveals that America has proclaimed “liberty and justice for all,” while allowing, legalizing, and institutionalizing “bondage and injustice for many.” That system of human bondage was called “the peculiar institution” by those who practiced it and defended it. America’s Bill of Rights and other glorious principles of freedom were not allowed to be applied to the people enslaved in “the peculiar institution.”
It took a brutal, internal war to end “the peculiar institution,” but it was soon replaced with other legalized forms of oppression and injustice. The “freedmen” and their descendants were forced to live as second class citizens under “Jim Crow” laws that denied their constitutional rights. They had to endure lynching, and other race-based terrorism. Meanwhile, the righteous principles of freedom continued to be proclaimed by their oppressors.
Black people could be convicted of a crime while legally not being allowed to testify in court. Then, once they were incarcerated, they were subject to “convict leasing.” They could be leased out to do brutal manual labor for private individuals, without pay and without protection against abuse. But Black people believed in the Bill of Rights even when those rights were being denied them through various legal and illegal means.
Black people, against almost impossible odds, continued to stake their claim to the American human rights principles. Inch by inch, over many decades they persisted. Many fought for America’s freedom principles in both World Wars. When they returned they expected that they would be granted more freedom at home for their sacrifices overseas. Instead they were brutally resisted, but they persisted to press for their freedom until a widespread movement of liberty arose.
The Civil Rights Movement finally brought down the oppressive Jim Crow laws and put Black Americans on equal legal footing with White Americans. It was a massive change that allowed Black people the legal freedom to begin to participate in the broader society, economy, and politics.
However, after centuries of racial divide and oppression, the legal changes didn’t automatically change people’s hearts or all the habits, beliefs, and systems that influence human behavior. We need to celebrate that America is now much more consistent with matching its human rights principles to its behaviors, while we strive to be honest about our history and to continually improve how people are treated.
It's easy to recite
What you've heard
And think you're right.
It's harder to hear
With delight
And fresh insight.
The more you choose to delighted by life, the less you will feel defeated by it. To avoid mental and emotional contamination, it’s important to filter your thinking.
Repentance is getting out of an emotional bear trap, being set free from mental hand cuffs, and crawling from under the rubble in your life.When you surrender your brokenness to the risen Jesus, He turns it into a platform from which to demonstrate his power and love in and thru you.
Rather than following our own blueprint or script, Christ-followers are called to continually obey the living Jesus.When Christians assemble as an audience, they abdicate their responsibility to be an interactive, Spirit-led body of believers.
Often when people and/or churches talk about Jesus, they are referring to a pseudo-Jesus. A pseudo-Jesus is any Jesus other than the living, resurrected, Jesus, present in and with His followers (as presented in the Bible).
When you bend In the wind That the living Jesus sends He will wend Your way with love.
Search for my book: The Joy Of Early Christianity.
If today was
My last day
I'd want to
Do or say
Something
That would show
Someone
The reality
Of the living Jesus.
Here’s some samples:
Spiritual rejuvenation is to continually experience the free flowing of the living Jesus from within you.The more room you make for the living Jesus to take over your life, the more joy you will experience.
Vulnerability, humility, and surrender prepare the way for the free flowing of the living Jesus from within you.Tear down the dams that prevent the free flowing presence of the living Jesus from cascading thru your life.
A burning desire to be continually aware of the presence of living Jesus is the key to the ongoing rejuvenation of your heart.When Christ in you is repressed, you prevent his glory from being expressed thru you. If you’re unwilling to do something different, unexpected, and unplanned, you won’t be able to follow the living Jesus.
Sip and savor God’s living water. Bask in the presence of the risen Jesus.The presence of Jesus will put your weary mind at ease and help your broken heart believe.The contemporary church seems to lack the power to move people beyond theology and words, into the reality of the risen Jesus.
Rejuvenation with redirection won’t last.When Jesus says “Repent,” it’s an invitation to remove the ruble from your life, rebuild with hope, and restore what’s been lost.
Open your heart and let the living Jesus usher in the healing flow of His presence.A heart continually canopied by the overgrowth of day-to-day busyness seldom sees the splendorous sight of the Son of God.
The more adherence you give to the presence of Jesus, the greater the clearance of guilt and shame from your life.The more you listen to Jesus’ melody, the more you’ll joyfully sing with emotional harmony.
The devil wants to cheat you out of inner peace. Jesus wants to treat you to the ongoing wonder of His daily presence.
I love To take the time To just be And let The living Jesus Flow thru me.
The inner jubilation Of spiritual rejuvenation Resounds within me.
For more of what I want to say about the wonders of a dynamic relationship with the living Jesus, get my book, The Joy Of Early Christianity.
To downplay, deny, or hide atrocities that were done to people because of their color, is to devalue all who look like them. To be unwilling to openly tell and expose the full truth about the people who suffered race-based cruelty and abuse in American history, is to deny that their descendants are of equal human worth to any other Americans.
A fuller, more accurate story of our history matters. Healing only comes from truth. Even Jesus said: “The truth will set you free.”
When we value people, their history matters to us. I value the history of black people (and other minorities) in America. Here’s why.
Bias blots our perception With toxic deception Until we no longer see Reality.
The world We’re born in Too often labels us By the melatonin In the skin We’re wrapped in.
Society has trained us to view people whose skin doesn’t match ours as mentally and emotionally different than us. That’s a lie.Noticing someone’s skin color has never been a problem but looking down on people’s skin color has released much cruelty.
Good skin color / bad skin color is a terrible game that people have played arrogantly for centuries, but it’s totally irrational.Attempts to define, confine, and consign people to an inferior status because of their skin color have caused immeasurable suffering
People enjoy connecting with their pets (no matter the color). Let’s try that with each other.We seldom evaluate the quality of things or animals by their color, so why do we do that with fellow members of the human race?
Categorizing humans by color was originally begun as an excuse to abuse and traffic people. Now it’s time to cancel the categories.
Sorting people by color is pretty nutty. If we would stop classifying people by race, it would make racism much more difficult.
We talk about White voters and Black voters. But nobody talks about Blue-eyed and Brown-eyed voters. If we can’t notice and appreciate people’s color without evaluating them by it, that’s racism.
