Jesus Disruption (eBook)

Shaking Up the Status Quo to Set You Free

Dan Grandstaff (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
236 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-1581-8 (ISBN)

'The Jesus Disruption' helps Christians discover the truth of their identity as a child of God. This is a page-turning journey to discover the heart of God and the new heart he's given to his children. There is a thicket of religious to-do lists that will not work. Save yourself years of frustration and distraction. Find the hidden treasure now.

"e;The Jesus Disruption"e; helps Christians discover the truth of their identity as a child of God. This is apage-turning journey to discover the heart of God and the new heart he's given to his children. There isa thicket of religious to-do lists that will not work. Save yourself years of frustration and distraction. Findthe hidden treasure now. Dan Grandstaff exposes the absurdity of "e;trying to become who you already are."e; If you find religion andthe Christian life confusing, this is the book for you. It is an aide in the search for the life you've beenlooking for all along.

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever found yourself wondering what your life or some part of it might look like if you could go back and do things over again, wishing for a way to make a trip to the past with the power to undo and redo something you know you got wrong?

It makes no difference that life doesn’t come with a rewind button, that what’s done is done and everything behind us is untouchable, we all take imaginary trips through time to slap what-ifs on the parts we wish we could change.

So why do we do it?

Despite its appearance, I believe we flip back through the pages of our story, not because we’re looking for a way to reconcile ourselves with the past, but because of a desperate need we have to somehow come to terms with the present. Like going back to some street we grew up on to reminisce, our minds carry us back to visit a difficult memory so we can walk along its edges and peek through the cracks in search of answers. Answers for why life hasn’t turned out the way we once thought it would.

If I’m right, then what’s motivating us to play these mind games is driven by more than fantasies about changing things that cannot be changed. We’re searching for something we lost between here and there. We’re looking for our hearts. The ones that once longed for mystery and saw the world as ours for the taking, but now seem nowhere to be found. Somewhere deep inside we know that if we can find and recover that heart, it will present us with the possibility to change something that can be changed. The rest of our lives!

The Bible tells us in the first chapter of Genesis that we were not merely created, but made in the image of God. Satan knows this better than we do and makes it his goal to crush the resemblance.

When we’re young we can hear that image calling to us, telling us that we were made for some grand purpose. But as time passes and the attacks mount, the beatings take a toll. And somewhere along the way, in an attempt to stop the pain, we hunker down, send the parts of our hearts that have been hurt the most into hiding, and end up living as someone less than the person we were created to be.

Whether this shift takes place early on in life, or slowly over time, the result of the slide will always be the same. Welcome to life in the middle, a world of compromise where we take our potential for godly greatness and abandon it to try to satisfy our demand to be safe and live a quiet life. It’s a terrible trade that swaps mystery and adventure to become average, and unless Jesus intervenes, we can languish there in the dull routine of the ordinary for a lifetime.

It doesn’t matter what we’re chasing after or how good we are at getting hold of it, nothing gets better in the middle, and we cannot rely on the status quo. The pieces are always moving which makes it a constant battle just to maintain. Meanwhile, as we’re hanging on by our fingernails, time moves on, we grow older and the meaning of life remains allusive.

If things are ever to be different, we must change, and as much as we would like to think it could, it cannot be done through business as usual. Real transformation always requires leaving the security of our familiar world to venture out into the chaos and uncertainty of one that is strange to us. It’s out there, in the do or die conflict that is certain to come, that a path gets cleared to our hearts and minds so that life changing truth can have a chance to make its way inside.

But leaving the world of what we know to hazard one we do not, is not something we line up to volunteer for. In fact, to convince someone to go on this journey, something in our everyday, life as usual, has to break and send us scrambling to find a way to put the pieces back in place.

Because we have an overwhelming inability to see our need for inner transformation, our strongest motivations come from our physical needs and wants. And when something on that list stops working and we can’t get it up and running again, we slowly begin to realize that we have been looking for life in something that has no power to give it. This is when Jesus has the best shot at helping us see that what we need is not an answer to the external problem that originally pushed us out of our circle, but the healing and transformation of some deep inner issue that was holding us captive there.

But if we never cross the line and follow Jesus into the unknown, the scaled down life it leaves behind will never satisfy our hearts because it does not match our divine DNA. We were made for something higher. A life of fantastic, risk taking adventure with God, and no matter how far off course we may be, we still have some memory of the image of God that we bear. And the gap between the life we were created for and the one we’ve stumbled into, is obvious to us. Small wonder that the thought of going back in time to do something different will cross our minds every now and then.

Are you aware that Jesus has been pursuing you with the gift of life and a whole heart since before you were born, and that the chase continues? For most of us the answer is probably no. Our fallen human nature has almost no ability to recognize when we’re being rescued. Even great acts of love feel like harassment when they try to pull us away from anything we’ve become convinced will bring us happiness, even terrible things. We are, it would seem, masters at misinterpreting the story we’re living in.

When I was a teenager I really got into throwing Halloween parties, and living on a farm gave me everything I needed to do them right; hayrides, bonfires and best of all, an old unused building I transformed into a haunted house.

Each year I would brainstorm and add something new to my spooky tour until I eventually came up with one of my most elaborate, and best ideas ever.

I built a bridge approximately twenty feet long that rose about five feet off the ground and twisted its way through a small grove of trees. As visitors finished the tour and were making their way back to the bonfire, they would cross the bridge and be forced to duck under the dangling feet of a man who’d been hanged by the neck from the tree above and left for the birds.

Shrouded in darkness and illuminated only by ultraviolet light, just as these unsuspecting onlookers would start to edge their way past, they would be startled when the feet they thought belonged to a dummy, began to twitch and kick.

Once the bridge was completed, I attached a large pulley high in the top of one of the trees. Then I took a rope, made a hangman’s noose and began working on a way to harness it to a real person. Something that, in my youthful abundance of ignorance, didn’t take long. I found an old truck tire inner tube, tied it in the middle like a giant bowtie and attached it directly to the hangman’s rope. Now the only thing left to do was find a volunteer.

My best friend Keith, who always helped me work on these projects, offered to ask his next-door neighbor Kevin to give us a hand. To give us the best chance of talking him into helping, he left out all the details about what we wanted him to do, and we had our volunteer.

But eventually he would need to know. So, to make sure every-thing worked and convince Kevin to let us hang him, we decided to get together one Saturday afternoon for a dress rehearsal. With everything ready and waiting, as soon as Kevin showed up and stepped out of his car, Keith and I began laying it on thick, telling him how amazing this gag was gonna be.

He seemed really enthusiastic about the whole thing until we got to the part about hanging him from a tree. That’s when he began to show signs of hesitation. And when we got underneath the tree and he saw how far that pulley was from the ground, he really started to get cold feet. But after assuring him of how much fun he was gonna have and how safe it would be, he reluctantly agreed to at least give it a shot.

We immediately began to harness him up before he had time to change his mind. After putting the inner tube contraption on him like a backpack, we slipped the noose around his neck and used a coat to hide the secret. Then, like a couple of eighteenth century merchant marines, we began hoisting him in the air like a bail of cotton.

Everything was going according to plan right up to the moment we got him to the top. We had just tied him off so we could stand back and enjoy how real it looked, when suddenly, that old inner tube snapped. Instantly, Kevin’s body dropped about ten inches and jerked to a stop when the noose took hold of his neck.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a hanging before, but let me tell you something. A guy will do some pretty crazy stuff when he’s hanging by nothing but his neck. It was so shocking and surreal that Keith and I both froze for a few seconds to watch in amazement. But fortunately, Keith was able to come to his senses and began yelling to get him down.

That was a great idea, except for one small problem. Kevin’s feet were hanging about ten feet off the ground and directly over one of the large posts that supported the bridge. If we simply let go he was sure to slam into it on the way down, break a few ribs, a leg or worse. Since we didn’t want to hurt him – we decided to lower him down gently, hand over hand, and it seemed to take forever. But once he was clear of the post we let him drop the last six feet or so and he hit the ground...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	3.10.2020
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-10	1-0983-1581-2 / 1098315812
ISBN-13	978-1-0983-1581-8 / 9781098315818

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