Food for thought.

Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.
-Tupac Shakur







This life is not some philosophical thought you can conjure up through meditation or some kind of theological abstraction to be debated. It is fullness. It is freedom.






Does all that memorization and attendance help you know the Father better?
Are you so busy seeking everyone's approval, you don't realize you already have His?






"You know that morning you got the attendance pin? If that pastor would have really loved you, do you know what he would have said? 'Ladies and gentlemen, we want to introduce a young man who has just completed a two-year span of never missing a Sunday school class. We want to pray for him because that means his family's priorities are so askew that for the last two years they never took a vacation together. It means he probably came here when he was sick and should have been at home resting. It means that winning this gold-plated trinket and your approval is more important to him than being your brother. And not one day of his attendance will draw him any closer to God."






Laced through the wonderful things you have [at church] is a system of religious obligation that distorts it all. Until you see that, you'll never know what it means to walk with the Father.







"One of the most significant lessons Jesus taught His disciples was to stop looking for God's life in the regimen of rituals and rules. He came not to refurbish their religion, but to offer them a relationship. Were all those healings on the Sabbath, and the recording of them, just a coincidence that he found more people then? Of course not! He wanted His disciples to know that the rules and traditions of men get in the way of the power and the life of His Father. And it can be pretty captivating, too, because we all do what we do thinking it pleases God. No prison is as strong as religious obligation. It takes us captive even while we're patting ourselves on the back. I walked past a synagogue yesterday and the rabbi came outside and asked if I could come in and turn some lights on for him. Someone had forgotten to do it the day before, and he couldn't do it himself without breaking the Sabbath."







"It takes wonderful words like 'Father' and 'love' and turns God into the divine policeman, waiting behind the billboard with his radar gun. Who wants to grow close to a Father like that? We can't love what we fear. you can't foster a relationship with someone who is always checking your performance to make sure it's adequate enough to merit his friendship. The more you focus on your own needs and failures, the more distant Father will seem to you. Guilt does that. It shoves us away from God in our time of need, instead of allowing us to run to him, presenting our greatest failures and questions so that we might receive his mercy and grace. Now we've invoked God and his punishment to shore up our sense of what it means to be a good Christian. Do you see a Father here who understands our bent toward sin, who knows how weak we are, whose love wants to meet us in our sinfulness and transform us to be his children, not based on our efforts but his?"





[Oh be careful little eyes what you see. For the Father up above is looking down in love.]
"Every time you sang it you thought of things your eyes had seen and your ears had heard that God would disapprove of. It made you feel bad, but feeling bad didn't make you do any better. So intellectually you are still thinking of Father's love, but intuitively you are being distanced from him. That's the worst thing that religion does. Who is going to draw near to God if he's always trying to catch people at their worst moments, or always punishing them for their failures? We're too weak for a God like that. We use guilt to conform people's behavior, never realizing the same guilt will keep them far from God."





Stop trying to get people to act more "Christian", help them get to know Jesus better and let Him change them from the inside out.





I will hold my head high
Above my enemies who surround me.

I can see through you, see your true colors.

For those celebrating that special day.