our ideas

You came by them innocently enough.  You learned them from your parents, you learned them from your teachers, you learned them from your pastor.  You came to believe your ideas about God, Jesus, salvation and the world.  You arranged them in your head so they made sense to you.  Maybe you adopted someone else’s system lock stock and barrel, and never really did any thinking for yourself.

Now you are an adult and you are running into people that are different than you.  Some of them are very different from you.  They have collected ideas about life and lined them out in a way that is threatening to your world view.

Commonly we might think, “let’s kill the heretics,” or we might say that they were going to hell.  Do you see this?  They have some ideas that are different than ours, so we are going to become judge, jury and executioner.

Was Jesus afraid of different ideas?  Was Paul?  Did they throw away every person that did not agree with them? 

One of the first signs that we are growing up is that we are no longer afraid of learning about different ideas.  Imagine a world where communists were no longer afraid of capitalists.  Where Christians were no longer afraid of Jews or Buddhists.  Where K-State fans were no longer afraid of KU fans.

Imagine a world where we walked into a group of people and just felt at home.  No fear.  No worry.  Simply because we decided that we would no longer be threatened by people that thought differently than we did.  Think of what we might learn from people whose idea box is not like ours. 

The end result of this is that our God gets bigger.  We learn about people that he loves and created that have a different way of looking at things.  And its ok.  God gets bigger.  We let him out of our box.  Except he was never bound by our box in the first place was he?  The only person bound by our box is us.

It’s a beautiful day in God’s world, be sure to see the good.