A friend, John Barach,
posts an excerpt of an
excellent essay by Christopher Wright, based on his book,
The Mission of God. These few points should help to turn much of our self-centered religion on its head and help us to see just how far our perspective and focus is from where it ought to be if we were viewing all things through a thoroughly Christian and biblical worldview. As John says, this corrective doesn't flip our thinking up-side-down so much as call us to turn right-side-up.
"Now such an understanding of the mission of God as the very heartbeat
of all reality, all creation, and all history generates a distinctive
worldview that is radically and transformingly God-centred. It turns
inside out and upside down some of the common ways in which we are
accustomed to think about the Christian life. It is certainly a very
healthy corrective to the egocentric obsession of much Western culture —
including, sadly, even Western Christian culture. It constantly forces
us to open our eyes to the big picture, rather than shelter in the cosy
narcissism of our own small worlds.
* We ask, ‘Where does God fit into the story of my life?’ when the
real question is where does my little life fit into this great story of
God’s mission.
* We want to be driven by a purpose that has been tailored just right
for our own individual lives, when we should be seeing the purpose of
all life, including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for
the whole of creation.
* We talk about ‘applying the Bible to our lives’. What would it mean
to apply our lives to the Bible instead, assuming the Bible to be the
reality — the real story — to which we are called to conform ourselves?
* We wrestle with ‘making the gospel relevant to the world’. But in
this story, God is about the business of transforming the world to fit
the shape of the gospel.
* We argue about what can legitimately be included in the mission
that God expects from the church, when we should ask what kind of church
God wants for the whole range of his mission.
* I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should be asking what kind of me God wants for his mission."
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