Phase 2

This is a six-week study:

Getting Sold Short

Have you ever felt lost, alone, and afraid? Have you ever felt like everyone around you is simply going through the motions of life with no spark, gusto, or energy?

It is easy to understand why "the world" –those who don’t claim to know Jesus-- is wallowing around in pain and misery, alone and confused. And, it is easy to understand why millions of people are medicating themselves with addiction to pleasure, power, fame, fortune, or any other kind of practice or position that will distract them from the feeling of emptiness deep inside their souls. It is also easy to understand why millions of people bounce from one failed marriage to another, abort unborn children for the sake of convenience, and manipulate others to rise to places of prestige. It’s easy to understand this because, well, quite frankly, their souls are empty. They are lost in the deep woods, have no bearings of their whereabouts, and have little sense of hope that they will ever get out.

While that may be a bleak picture of the world, it is easy to understand and agree that a vast majority are living in the dark place. Here is what is difficult to understand. It is difficult to understand why a vast amount of Christians don't look much different from the world. Why are people who claim to be "saved" through "the blood of Jesus" and are looking forward to going to Heaven some day spending much of their time on Earth chasing after the same things that the world is chasing after?

One answer could be that every believer battles against their old sinful nature and is struggling to break free of old patterns of living. This is very true, and we do not want to downplay the reality of this. But, perhaps there is a deeper reason. Perhaps Christians are not experiencing the joy of their salvation and producing the fruit of the Spirit that Jesus and the apostles promised for one simple, yet very sad, reason. Could it be that Contemporary, American Christians have been misinformed about what it means to "be saved?" Is it possible that our collective understanding of the word "salvation" and "the Kingdom of God " that has been inherited from 19th and 20th century European and American theologians has fallen short of the full, biblical meaning of these terms?

Imagine if someone gave you a tripod stool to sit on and it had only two legs. How successful would you be at sitting on that stool? You would spend the first part of your experience trying to figure out how to sit on that stool. After many failed attempts you may eventually give up the endeavor altogether and seek out another stool on which to sit. Or imagine if you were sold an automobile with a 4 cylinder engine that only had three cylinders firing. The car would be a lemon. You may be able to get places, but you would be plugging and chugging the whole way. Or again, what if you sat down to play a game of cards but there were only 47 cards in the deck. It's almost complete, and the game could progress for a while, but eventually you would realize that something smelled fishy and you would call for a do-over.

Now imagine if the teaching about salvation and the kingdom of God that you had received was only two-thirds correct. Everything you had learned was true, but there was a huge component missing. How would you feel? Well, that is what this book is all about...the one third that is missing.

It is my proposal that many Christians are not experiencing the joy of their salvation in the daily ebb and flow of normal life because they do not have an accurate, or complete, understanding of what they possess. They own a Porsche, but were never told that it can be taken out of first gear. They live in a huge mansion, but have camped out in the entry way. They haven’t yet entered into the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to bring to them.