Changing the spiritual climate... #1

I am trying on a new idea... Please help me process:

The hypothesis is this: knowing truth doesn't change very much.

Jesus is true. He says He is the way the Truth and the life and no one comes to the Father accept through Him. Once He makes that claim, He is either right or He is wrong. I happen to believe with conviction that He was right. I believe it with so much conviction that I have given my life in full time service to that reality.

That being said, I am not sure that "knowing" that truth does very much for me. That prepositional reality is not the transformational power that I hoped it would be. There are lots of truths that I know to be true, but I do not follow them. Eating healthy is better for me. Exercising will give me more energy. From the way I spend money to the way I interact with others to how I fix things around the house, there are truths that I know, but do not follow.

Extrapolate this out to the average American Christian... We all know vast amounts of Scripture that we hold to be true. We hear sermons each week full of sound biblical truth. But are we changed?

Let me take a stab at where your mind is right now... But what about the verse that says, "you will know the truth and the truth will set you free...?"

That is just it.. In order for that to be correct, truth has to be more than a prepositional treatise that I ascribe to. Truth has to be a person. And that person is Jesus. So, then, knowing the truth is more about knowing how to interact with Jesus in a legitimate relationship than it is about being right. He said is the truth. Truth is a person, not a preposition or an idea.

But then that leads to a whole other set of questions. Not the least of which is: How do I have relationship with Jesus? Or what does relationship with Jesus look like? Or how do I know when I am in the kind of relationship with Jesus that He wants? Or how can I feel safe in how much I have done to be faithful to that relationship? Or how do I experience God's favor as an overflow of that relationship? Or any other of about a million other questions....

Now we move into the guts my thought. Jesus tells 38 stories that we have recorded in Scripture. Of those, 20 say this - the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) is like... Somehow, Jesus is expressing this transformational reality of relationship with Him as living in a Kingdom. So, then, if we are going to understand how to be truly transformed by a relationship with Jesus, we are going to have to come to terms with what this whole Kingdom thing really is all about.

So, I am going to do a series of posts about the Kingdom, Our role in it, and how that can truly change the world. May we all be brought to life in a fresh way through this process.