If the gospel you hear is all about Jesus dying and being resurrected but nothing about how He lived what He taught, you’re missing the part of the story that really changes your life.
Because it tells and shows you how to live what He taught.
How to love others as yourself, show grace, forgive, be generous, be compassionate, feed others, wash their feet, help them heal, and be self-less.
If the whole story doesn’t make you want to change your life to reflect that, then all the faith and confession and water immersion and ritual-observance is just a way to spend some time.
The whole gospel changes you. Who you are. Who you want to be. The kind of person you want to live as.
If you didn’t hear that in the good news you heard, you were cheated. You were misled. You were misdirected, maybe for the sake of conversion numbers and goals; maybe just from being taught by someone who was mis-taught and under-informed. You got a little good news, and it may have sounded like the whole thing, because life-after-death is a pretty spectacular idea.
But it’s not the whole idea. THIS life matters NOW. Other people matter NOW. How you live and who you are matters NOW.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with first framing the saying about people who are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
And there’s a point there. That outlook comes from buying into half-a-gospel; the gospel that’s good news for ME. A death and resurrection that means I get to live again.
But that doesn’t really have any meaning if life isn’t lived fully — “abundantly” is the word Jesus of Nazareth uses — right here and now. So that others whom He loves (and we should love) can benefit from that life here and now as well.
I mean, how are people going to be convinced that they matter in an afterlife if they don’t feel like they matter in this life?
Sorry to sermonize on a Sunday. I’m still no preacher. But sometimes I see other posts that feel like what Brian McLaren called “Adventures in Missing the Point.”
Rant over.
Blog In My Own Eye 
Not a rant, but excellent comments for thought and digestion
Keith,
Long-time reader and admirer of your confessions and musings. The Spirit has used most of them–if not all of them–to shape me in Christoform ways, so thanks for being reliably honest and vulnerable with your thoughts. 🙂
Given your thoughts above (and Mr. Holmes’ apt quote), I’m genuinely curious what you’d make of another well-known quote from C.S. Lewis: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.”
Personally–i.e. this is something I’ve personally struggled with–I think the disconnect between Holmes’ observation and Lewis’ is the simple fact that many church-goers simply do not believe the things they say they believe about heaven and the coming Kingdom.
Here’s what I’ve found to be true: Setting our hearts/minds “on things above” means spending the rest of our lives “putting into practice” the Way of Life we’ll be living for the rest of eternity. It means accepting the fact that our eternal lives have already started–so we need to start practicing that kind of life now. Sure, Sin and Death have yet to be vanquished, so our efforts won’t be perfect–but I think that’s precisely why Jesus emphasized over and over His command to “practice,” i.e. you practice what you haven’t yet perfected.
Bottom-line: I think there’s a lot of “inherited theological noise” regarding works-based righteousness that enables people to soften the expectations and implications of what Jesus meant when He invited us to follow Him. That softening, I think, enables the hypocrisy and irony Holmes was referring to.