No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:24
“How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe. We are all and forever beggars before God and the universe. We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, with most of my preferences and addictions still fully in place but now well disguised. Any attempts at self-conversion would be like an active alcoholic trying to determine his own rules for sobriety. God has to radically change the central reference point of our lives.”
Richard Rohr in Breathing Under Water (London: SPCK, 2016), 55.
“How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.”
Many people think Jesus cares what you believe. He doesn’t. James, the half brother of Jesus tells us, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder” (James 2:19).
Jesus cares what you do. He wants to see us radically change directions.
Someone asked me yesterday what it will look like to aim to take Generosity Monk global. I quoted Victor Hugo in reply. “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
The time has come to awaken the global church to do life in a manner that demonstrates radical change.
Specifically, I am speaking about how we handle God’s money and how we live simply, give sacrificially, serve humbly, and love generously before a watching world.
“How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.”
Rohr is right. And consider yourself warned. Why? Most people do life in a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, which is no conversion at all.
When God is the central reference point of our lives, we do life different from the world.