I thought for todays write up for my blog i would post something from the book Jesus Manifesto that i read and found really intresting.
I say one thing go out and buy it, it is really inspiring to read. It makes you fall more and more in love with Jesus.
It also makes you think about the beauty and majesty of Christ our King.
Enjoy and remember to pick up a copy from Amazon....
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In faith, there is a "gotcha" moment, when Jesus gets you for life. The gotcha moment may take millions of minutes or just one. But when Jesus gets you for life, you begin to live out of Jesus-love. When we present ourselves as "living offereings" to Christ, suddenly questions of what to do and what not to do take on a whole new meaning. Once we are truly sharing our lives with Christ and learning to live His love, then truly Charitas Christi urget nos: "The love of Christ constrains us".
It is not the commandments and the laws that control our behavior. It is the presence of the indwelling Christ and Jesus-love that bothrestrains and releases us. A relational Christ ethic is why Paul said Christians don't have sex with prositiues. Since Christ is living His resurrected life in and through you, would you want Jesus to share that purchase of lust with you? Would Jesus treat any woman like a purchase? The commandements are paper handcuffs compared to Jesus' love strands. It is "the love of Christ" that impels, compels, and propels us--a love that is so captivating we become free to do it all...in love, with love, for love.
Of the millions of words dicated by the gifted Latin-speaking Christian Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430), these are perhaps the most important but also the most misread: Dilige, et quod vis fac, "Love God, and do what you will." If you love God, or love another, the one thing you cannot do is what you will, for love bends the will. To live in God's love is not license for hedonism, but liberty for sacrifical living where we're all working off the same brief, which reads, " As i have loved you, so you must love one another" and Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
To live the "incarnate life" is to do little large. God does little large. That is the story of the incarnation, and that is the metanarrative of the Bible. At the heart of orthodoxy and paradoxy: the paradpx of the littlest revealing the largest and the finite revealing the infinite. The incarnation is both once-and-for-all and ongoing, as the One who "was and who is to come" now is, and lives His resurrection life in and through us. An "already now" participates in the "still not yet."
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