Faking it is not how we intend to live, and sometimes, when we do find ourselves doing so, even unintentionally, we’re not really sure how we got there. I think we can all agree that the last thing a lost and dying world needs is an army of cute entertainers who are only interested in putting on a show with an impotent gospel that temporarily fixes our symptoms but doesn’t heal the heart, soul, and body.
We all need the reality of Jesus, not just a religious concept of who He is. And we need to see the manifestation of the good news He brings in and through our lives in the midst of the darkness, where bad things are still happening to good people on a daily basis. To be clear, God does not cause bad things to happen; He is good to the core and has only goodness to give. We live in a fallen world that is in grave need of the good news of the gospel through Jesus Christ who reconciles all things. We are empowered to pray that His kingdom come and His will be done here on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10) to thwart the darkness and cancel every assignment of the enemy, releasing God’s goodness wherever we go.
My husband, Paul, has often spoken of the time he gave his life to Jesus at age sixteen. His passion for Jesus and the house of God became so extreme that his parents, who weren’t believers at the time, thought he had joined a cult. He had become a new person, turning from the life he once lived and choosing to walk with passion in a completely different direction, following Jesus with his entire life. His internal world was leading his external world. Before this, Paul had gone to Catholic school and to church for Easter and Christmas each year with his family to be, in his words, “inoculated with just enough Christianity not to take it too seriously.” I think somehow in our Western, consumerist culture, the Good News has been lost on some of us—maybe because we’ve mixed in just a little bit of Jesus, inoculating ourselves with Him rather than gladly surrendering our whole lives.
