"I am The Way, The Truth and The Life. No one comes to the Father, except by me."
- Jesus Christ (John 14:6)
The earliest followers of Christ considered themselves as plunging into "The Way". This was an all encompassing lifestyle that followed the way of Jesus, the way of the Kingdom, and the way of the Cross. They looked to nothing or no one else for their inspiration. Their eyes were on Jesus alone... what he said, how he said it and what he did when he didn't say anything.
If we want to be true followers of Christ, we too must submerge ourselves in The Way. Everything we need to know about how to live, how to love and how to die is summed up in the person of Jesus Christ.
And by proclaiming Christ, and taking on the name of "Christian" we accept responsibility for being his ambassadors here on earth. Just as a political ambassador is that nation's representation in a foreign country, we are representatives of Christ to this world. This means that people are supposed to look at us and see Jesus in everything we do. We are supposed to be helping them find The Way.
If we are not truly in The Way, then we are simply in the way...
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Are you in The Way, or are you in the way?
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N.T. Wright is Bishop of Durham, England and has authored more than 30 books and taught at Cambridge and Oxford. He even wears his shirt backwards (all you see is the collar). I don't know that he will ever stumble on your blog, so I'll quote a couple of paragraphs out of his book "Simply Christian', these are found on page 123 if you want to check the context.
"I use the 'church' here with a somewhat heavy heart. I know that for many of my readers that very word will carry the overtones of large, dark buildings, pompous religious pronouncements, false solemnity, and rank hypocrisy. But there is no easy alternative. I, too, feel the weight of that negative image. I battle with it professionally all the time.
But there is another side to it, a side which shows all the signs of the wind and fire, of the bird brooding over the waters and bringing new life. For many, 'church' means just the opposite of that negative image. It's a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It's where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. Its where one group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It's where you'll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry purpose out. It's where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship one true God that whole becomes greater than the sum of it's parts. No church is like this all the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time."
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