Posted on 01/24/2008 11:14:00 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
ORLANDO, Florida (AP) -- Donald Miller still loves God and Jesus. Don't misunderstand him.
His problem is with Christianity, at least how it's often practiced.
"It's a dangerous term so I try to avoid it," said Miller, who considered giving up his career as a Christian writer and leaving the church in 2003 because he couldn't attend services without getting angry.
For him, the word conjured up conservative politics, suburban consumerism and an "insensitivity to people who aren't like us."
To quell his rage, he sat in his boxer shorts and banged out a memoir of his experiences with God, stripped of the trappings of religion.
"Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality" sold just enough to pay a few months rent. Then five years later, spurred by a grass-roots movement of 20-something Christians longing to connect to God without ties to the religious right, the book became a sudden hit.
Fans were buying caseloads and passing out copies to friends. It peaked at No. 18 on The New York Times list of best-sellers among paperback nonfiction in November. He was mobbed by fans after a recent Young Life conference in Orlando where he addressed a crowd of roughly 4,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
True,panther.As the world gets worse,I find myself leaning to Christ and the reality that God’s love,not man’s sins and vanities, are the only things that are truly important.
It is extremely hard to be moral in an immoral or amoral world.I find myself self isolating more and more.Even on this board,all you have to do is go to the teenage sex with teachers topics to see how leering and hypocritical some of us”conservatives”can be.
And,yeah,I have been at fault a couple of times myself.The Devil never rests!
Great points!
Best bet is just live our lives...Christ knows we’re human and can’t help but to live in this world until it’s our time. I’ll screw up and I ask for forgiveness and understanding and try to learn and try to go on...
I’ve begun to focus on what’s right more often and this really helps. The older I get the more I also realize I’m one day closer to the end. Or the beginning, depending on your perspective!
I’m a hospice nurse and people ask all the time how I deal with such a depressing job...and believe me there are bad days I can’t describe...
but once you focus your perspective differently, it looks very differenet. Alleviating the suffering and making quality of life a priority and not the quantity of life, makes all the difference!
Even when they’re old and ready, sometimes you see people get more out of their life than any other time in their life!
About eight years ago my daughter told me that God had laid on her heart to pray daily for Bill Clinton, and she has, faithfully. It raises a few eyebrows when she does it during a group prayer. Some of us Evangelicals definitely aren’t perfect. I’ll leave it at that.
The sentence before reads:
Watching TBN one night on TV, Miller, 36, realized the conservative religious network was many people's baseline for Christianity. He wanted to change that.
You ever watch TBN ... his concern, one which I share, is that this is the only image of Christianity lots of people have.
That’s kinda like saying that Flava Flav is the only image of black people that some people have
Yeah, it's kinda like that
Amen to your thoughts.I concur wholeheartedly.
I think that our time here on Earth is like a boot camp for the soul.A training ground for the Great Beyond.Thus our mortality and everyday concerns are just not as all out important as we have been conditioned to believe.
I’m not a big fan of all the New Age hoopla but I do recall Donald Walsch saying that when we finally come face to face with God,our Father,we will weep at how beautifully PERFECT our lives on Earth actually were and how His plan was fulfilled through us.
A few of us are beginning to feel that way even before our passing.
I would say a person has that image because they WANT to have that image
Something that few people seem to realize. They want it to be an either/or sort of thing. The right answer of course is what Lewis states, to choose to be neither.
That's exactly what I was thinking as I read the article. Satan is so subtle and has an alternative to Christ for everyone - false religions like Islam, and now, low and behold, a Christianity that is perfectly fine with a philosophy that is in total opposition to Scripture and teaches that the knuckledraggers who go to "traditional" churches and believe all that garbage about "Christian morality" are nothing more than haters -God actually has no problem with homosexuality after all!
Yes, God takes people as they are- filthy, fallen, sin-sick- but He takes them to save them and wash away their sin and reconcile them to Himself and forgive their sin and make them guiltless in His eyes- He doesn't "accept people as they are" and let them go on rebelling against Him.
This is a perfect ploy of Satan's to make people who are in desperate need of salvation believe that they are okay and that God has no problem with their sin. What this guy is telling people is extremely dangerous, and those who buy into it will get the shock of all eternity when they stand before God.
Yes, I do believe this is the falling away. The only comfort we can take out of watching this is the knowledge that it means that Christ's return is near.
... and I would say that I am bothered by that image. I've been a Christian for a long time and I don't even know Christians this weird.
Oh, wait, that's what Miller was saying.
WELL stated!
...and in humility.
>>That was righteous anger.<<
Bingo!
And exaggeration perhaps, to make a point, but I don’t think it was a strawman at all. Just an extreme example of the extremes that some people go to in their own ideology which they then use as a litmus test to judge someone else’s position or someone else’s salvation.
Well thanks!
I struggle with it all the time.
Can you direct me to thread where that has literally happened? I have not seen that.
We are called to love our enemies.
I think there is an very important distinction between loving our enemies and denying that we have any.
Matthew 10
32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.
34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
God forgive me.
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