Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis is a great book to read with friends. Here are some of my favorite concepts from the text…
- One of the central assertions of the Christian worldview is that there is “more”.
- Jesus was not making claims about one religion being better than all other religions. (when he said “I am the way, the truth, and the life”)
- Our words aren’t absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations.
- Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.
- But God is bigger than any wall. God is bigger than any religion. God is bigger than any worldview. God is bigger than the Christian faith.
- You rarely defend the things you love. You enjoy them and tell others about them and invite others to enjoy them with you. Have you ever seen someone pull a photo out of their wallet and argue about the supremacy of this particular loved one? Of course not. They show you the picture and give you the opportunity to see what they see.
- Jesus invites everybody to jump. And saying yes to the invitation doesn’t mean we have to have it all figured out. This is an important thing to remember: I can jump and still have questions and doubts. I often meet people who are waiting to follow God until they have all their questions answered. They will be waiting for a long time, because if we knew everything, we’d be… God. So the invitation to jump is an invitation to follow Jesus with all of our doubts and questions right there with us.
- Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions, arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God. This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having to have it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from always having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.
- Truth always leads to more… truth.
- Sean Penn put it this way: “When everything gets answered, it’s fake. The mystery is the truth.”
- The point is joy. That is when God is most pleased. They aren’t two different things: God’s joy over here and our joy over there. They are the same. God takes great pleasure in us living as we were made to live.
- And while I’m at it, let’s make a group decision to drop once and for all the Bible-as-owner’s-manual metaphor. It’s terrible. It really is. You only refer to an owner’s manual when something is wrong. You use it to fix the problem, and then you put it away. We have to embrace the Bible as the wild, uncensored, passionate account it is of people experiencing the living God. Doubting the one true God. Wrestling with, arguing with, getting angry with, reconciling with, loving, worshiping, thanking, following the one who gives us everything. We cannot tame it. We cannot tone it down. If we do, then we can’t say it is the life-giving Word of God. We have made it something else.
- “Christian” is a great noun and a poor adjective.
- Desire. Longing. Come as you are. Connection. A group of people desperate to experience God.
- The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.
- We had no 5 year plan. We had no vision statement. We had no goals. We had no “demographic”. All we cared about was trying to teach and live the way of Jesus. It’s still all we care about.
- All of a sudden thre are all of these people who know who you are and want something from you and think you’re a big deal, and you are the same person you’ve always been.
- It’s one thing to be an intern with dreams about how church should be. It’s another thing to be the 31 year old pastor of a massive church. I was moments away from leaving the whole thing. I wasn’t sure I was a Christian anymore. I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a Christian anymore. I was burned out. I was full of doubt. It’s only when you hit bottom and are desperate enough that things start to get better.
- A new journey began, one that has been very, very painful. And very, very freeing. I learned that I have a soul.
- I need a God for now. I need healing now. I need help now. Yes, even greater things will happen someday. But salvation is now.
- I started a church and a lot of people were coming to hear me speak, and I had things I had never dealt with and they were still there, even after I “made it”. If you have issues surrounding your identitiy, those issues will not go away if you “make it”. It is easier to keep going than to stop and begin diving into the root causes.
- I think this is why so many pastors have affairs. They don’t know how to stop. They are driven and are achieving and are exhausted and don’t know how to say they’re tired. They are scared to look weak. So they start looking for a way out. They know that a “moral failure” will give them the break they’re looking for.
- We put on the mask, suck it up, and keep going.
- As I let all this come spewing forth the first time in my therapist’s office, he interrupted me. I was making lists of all the people I was workking to keep happy. He said it was clear that there were significant numbers of people I was spending a significant amount of time working to please and that my issue was a simple one. I was anticipating something quite profound and enlightening as I got out my pen. He said this: “Sin”. And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, “your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”
- So I had one choice – I had to kill superpastor.
- Movement / Chapter Five: DUST footnotes a great website… www.followtherabbi.com
- Rabbits had no interest in having the student spit back information just for information’s sake. They wanted to know if the student understood it, if he had wrestled with it. This notion is difficult for the modern mind to grasp because we generally think of education as the transmission of information. The better a student is, the better she is able to produce the right information at the right time.
- In the world of rabbinic education, the focus was on questions, which demonstrated that the student not only understood the information but could then take the subject a step further.
- One of the earliest sages of the Mishnah, Yose ben Yoezer, said to disciples, “Cover yourself with dust of [your rabbi's] feet.”
- The idea of being covered in the dust of your rabbi came from something everybody had seen. A rabbi would come to town, and right behind him would be this group of students, doing their best to keep up with the rabbi as he went about tearching his yoke from one place to another. By the end of the day of walking in the dirt directly behind their rabbi, the students would have the dust rom his feet all over them. And that was a good thing.
- Jesus calls the not-good-enoughs.
- He tells them at Caesarea Philippi that upon this rock he is going to build his new witnessing community, and the Gates of Hell won’t be able to stop it. He is essentially saying that those kinds of people – the ones with the goats – are going to join the Jesus movement and it will be unstoppable. How would you as a disciple even begin to process this statement?
- If you are a disciple, you have committed your entire life to being like your rabbi. If you see your rabbi walk on water, what do you immediately want to do? Walk on water. So this disciple gets out on the water and he starts to sink, so he yells, “Jesus save me!” And Jesus says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Who does Peter lose fatih in? Not Jesus; Jesus is doing fine. Peter loses faith in himself. Peter loses faith that he can do what his rabbi is doing.
- A rabbi would only pick a disciple who he thought could actually do what he was doing. Notice how many places in the accounts of Jesus’ life he gets frustrated with his disciples. Because they are incapable? No, because of how capable they are. He sees what they could be and could do, and when they fall short, it provokes him to no end. It isn’t their failure that’s the problem; it’s their greatness. They don’t realize what they are capable of.
- God has an incredibly high view of people. God believes that people are capable of amazing things. I have been told that I need to believe in Jesus. Which is a good thing. But what I am learning is that Jesus believes in me.
- I have been told that I need to have faith in God. Which is a good thing. But what I am learnig is that God has faith in me. The rabbi thinks we can be like him.
- It seemed to me that becoming a Christian had given him all sorts of new things to feel guilty about. I wondered if becoming a Christian had made his life not better but actually worse.
- And then a little while later I had a similar experience. I was listening to a pastor speak, and his point was that people weren’t reading their Bibles enough and weren’t praying enough and weren’t being spiritual enough. If people would just do more – read their Bibles more and pray more and be more spiritual – basically just more “mores,” then God would be happy with them. I felt terrible. What was the point of even trying? It’s not that praying and reading the Bible are bad; it’s just that I wanted to do them less and less the more and more he talked.
- It wasn’t so much what he was saying as it was the place he was coming from. The beginning premise seemed that we are bad and don’t do enough, and if we are made to feel guilty enough about it, then we will change our behavior. I don’t think this is what Jesus had in mind.
- His greatest anger was reserved for religious leaders who weighed people down with guilt and shame. He says to a group of Bible scholars and teachers, “You experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”
- He goes on to say that it is possible for religious leaders to actually get in the way of people entering into the life of God.
-Now this idea of death and rebirth is not a new idea – it has been around in almost every religious tradition sice people first started talking about these things. But the first Christians believed that this idea had been lived out in a new and unique way in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Paul put it like this in the book of Colossians: “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”
- So this old nature of mine – the one that was constantly pulling me down and causing me to live in ways I wasn’t creted to live – has died. And no matter how many times that old nature raises its ugly head and pretends to be alive, it is dead. And not only did that old person die, but I have been given a new nature.
- The issue then isn’t my beating myself up over all of the things I am not doing or the things I am doing poorly; the issue is my learning who this person is who God keeps insisting I already am.
- This is an issue of identity. It is letting what God says about us shape what we believe about ourselves. This is why shame has no place whatsoever in the Christian experience. It is simply against all that Jesus is for. As the writer to the Romans put it, ”Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
- None.
- No shame.
- No list of what is being held against us.
- No record of wrongs.
- It has simply been done away with.
- It is no longer an issue.
- Bringing it up is pointless.
- Beating myself up is pointless.
- Beating others up about who and what they are not is going the wrong direction. It is working against the purposes of God. God is not interested in shaming people; God wants people to see who they really are.
- “Let us live up to what we have already attained.”
- I am not who I was.
- You are not who you were.
- Old person going away, new person here, now.
- Reborn, rebirthed, remade, reconciled, renewed.
- Jesus put it this way: “You are in me and I am in you.”
- When we stumble and fall back into old patterns, we call them what they are: old patterns. Old ways. Old habits of the old person.
- Eternal life then is a certain kind of life I am living more and more now and will go on forever. I am living more and more in connection with God, and I will live connected with God forever.
- This has huge impications for when I do stumble, when I sin and the old person comes back from the dead for a few moments.
- I admit it.
- I confess it.
- I thank God I am forgiven.
- I make amends with anyone who has been affected by my actions.
- And I move on.
- Not because sin isn’t serious, but because I am taking seriously who God says I am. The point isn’t my failure; it is God’s success in remaking me into the person he originally intended me to be.
- God’s strength, not mine. God’s power, not mine.
- I heard a teacher say that if people were taught more about who they are, they wouldn’t have to be told what to do. It would come naturally. When we see religious communities spending most of their time trying to convince people not to sin, we are seeing a community that has missed the point. The point isn’t sin management. The point is who we are now.
- We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.
- God is retelling each of our stories in Jesus. All of the bad parts and the ugly parts and the parts we want to pretend never happened are redeemed. They seemed pointless and they were painful at the time, but God retells our story and they become the moments when God’s grace is most on display. We find ourselves asking, am I really forgiven of that? The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true. Our choice becomes this: We can trust his retelling of the story, or we can trust our telling of our story. It is a choice we make every day about the reality we are going to live in.
- And this reality extends beyond this life. Heaven is full of forgiven people. Hell is full of forgiven people. Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for. Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for. The difference is how we choose to live, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust.
- When we choose God’s vision of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever. This is the life of heaven, here and now. And as we live this life, in harmony with God’s intentions for us, the life of heaven becomes more and more present in our lives. Heaven comes to earth. This is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” There is this place, this realm, heaven, where things are as God desires them to be. As we live this way, heaven comes here. To this place, this world, the one we’re living in.
- For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one because he understood that the life beyond this one is a continuation of the kinds of choices we make here and now.
- Jesus’ desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth.
- For Jesus, this new kind of life in him is not about escaping this world but about making it a better place, here and now. The goal for Jesus isn’t to get into heaven. The goal is to get heaven here. Jesus tells another story about a rich man and a beggar who lies outside the rich man’s gates. The rich man dies and goes to hell, while the beggar dies and goes to “Abraham’s side,” a Jewish way of describing heaven. This is the one story Jesus tells in which somebody is actually in hell after they have died. What is the reason? According to the details of the story, the rich man refused to be generous with the poor man, letting him live a hell on earth right outside his front door.
- Jesus wants his followers to bring heaven, not hell, to earth. This has been God’s intention for people since the beginning. Jesus is not teaching anything new for his day. God walked in the garden, looking for Adam and Eve. God told the Israelites to build a tavernacle so he could live in their midst. King Solomon built a temple, God’s house, so God could live permanently among his people. And when Jesus comes, he’s referred to as God “taking on flesh and dwelling among us”. Another translation of this verse is, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”
- The problem is that the image of God is deeply scarred in each of us, and we lose trust in God’s version of the story. It seems too good to be true. And so we go searching for identity. We achieve and we push and we perform and we shop and we work out and we accomplish great things, longing to repair the image. Longing to find an identity that feels right.
- Longing to be comfortable in our own skin.
- But the thing we are searching for is not somewhere else. It is right here. And we can only find it when we give up the search, when we surrender, when we trust. Trust that God is already putting us back together.
- It is trusting that I am loved. That I always have been. That I always will be. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to prove anything or achieve anything or accomplish one more thing. That exactly as I am, I am totally accepted, forgiven, and there is nothing I could ever do to lose this acceptance. (footnote: Romans 8:37-39)
- This is our invitation. To trust that we don’t owe anything. To trust that something is already true about us, something has already been done, someting has been there all along.
- To trust that grace pays the bills.
