Too Good to be True

I phrase I remember reading in a book by Hannah Whitall Smith; “Some believers wear their Christianity like a crown, and others were it like a headache.”

One of the things Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings along with Paul Young are being accused of especially since the release of their joint collaboration on the book, The Shack, is making God way to friendly and loving, can you believe that?

Quoting Wayne Jacobsen here from The Naked Church, this is sweet. “Without a proper understanding of how we participate in God’s righteousness, we are prevented from fully tasting God’s goodness. Nothing pales the temporal happiness that sin offers any faster than the joy of God’s presence. Many people have never seen a Christianity that exciting and vibrant. All they’ve seen is people weighed down by the obligations of church attendance, Christian works, and ethics.”

This whole thing of being Righteous is a scary proposition in the mind that sees it only possible through much sweating and labouring over performance based behaviour. I love how Paul spoke of righteousness, being a by product of faith, one that is produced in those who simply respond to being Loved!

While still in the institutional box of the Vineyard, I remember singing one particular song, one of the lines went like this; “Holiness (righteousness) is your life in me making me clean through your blood. Holiness is your fire in me, purging my heart like a flood. I know you are perfect in Holiness your life in me setting me free making me holy.”
Today those are no longer mere words song in a quasi artificial setting, aka a church meeting, but in fact it is a living beat that I now wake up to. Each day I am discovering I am loved of the Father, no longer trying to be loved because of my vain and foolish sweat stained works.

Why is this so difficult to grasp, “Anything that is not of faith IS sin?” Whatever is NOT initiated in the heart of the Father is sin.
So many times our brother Paul was fully anticipating a receptivity by the family of God whereby he would speak freely of the hidden wisdom of the Father only to discover so many were yet so immature, and acting like mere men, as without the spirit of God within them.
Maybe that is what is alluded to here from Hebrews; “Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that uses milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongs to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”

This encounter of the most holy kind I am continuing to experience on a daily basis is just too good to be true.
I am learning to wear my Christianity like a crown, the crown of Life.
The training and equipping that I am experiencing in my moment by moment living in Him, is a revelation, no longer a lifeless seminar.

Rich