People received, affirmed and experienced grace in many different forms.
There's way too much wonder and mystery all around us to not stay open to more that's going on here. You can wake up, and sense and feel and taste and hear a whole world right here within this one, right here in this breath you're about to take.
Many in the modern world fell for the myth that we're living in a static, fixed, flat reality of just material things.
The hardness of the human heart makes no sense.
God gives us what we want. For people who want nothing to do with peace, joy, reconciliation and peace... God will give you what you want. I see people make unbelievably destructive choices.
The resurrection confronts our world with wonder, mystery, and miracles.
Sociologically, large groups of people don't generally have massive changes in their belief instantaneously.
I think that grace and love always rattle people.
I would hope that wherever I go I bring good news - that's what that word means, right? It began with the first followers of Jesus taking a Roman military propaganda term and co-opting it for their own subversive purposes, insisting that the world isn't made better through coercive military violence but through sacrificial love. How great is that!? Unfortunately this word has been hijacked in several years for other purposes but no worries, we're taking it back.
I have met countless people who call themselves Christians who don't appear to have any living breathing vibrant connection with the resurrected Christ and I've met countless people from every religious background including atheists that tell me of their very personal and real experiences of the living Christ. I don't have people asking me why they should believe something - that's starting off on the wrong foot to say the least.
There are moments when we have to return to our roots.
It's absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.
We live in the midst of a creation that is groaning.
Culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from two thousand years ago as their best defense. When you have in front of you flesh and blood people who are your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, co-workers and neighbors and they love each other and they just want to go through life with someone.
I do a meet and greet after every show in which I tell the audience that I would love to thank every single one of them for coming. Which a lot of people take me up on! So I get to meet hundreds and hundreds of people every night, night after night.
Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.
We all want to make a difference, to live in peace, to have joy each morning that we get to live this day and see what it brings.
That may sound a big vague, but what has struck me in city after city is that despite our differences and diversity, there's a common humanity we all share. In many ways we're all searching and longing for the same things.
The interactions I have are with people who are very kind and very grateful and they say very overwhelming things to me. Somebody who doesn't like what I do or doesn't understand it, then it wasn't for them.
People have a view of a God who is terrible that they can't even imagine being loving or wanting anything to do with.
What's interesting is, if you take the scientists and the theologians, the really good ones, they end up both filled with this wide-eyed sense of wonder and awe about look at this world we live in.
Being a pastor for 20 years I realized that the labels, agnostic, atheist, believer, everybody's human and everybody wants to know what kind of universe we're living in, and everybody's living according to a story.
I thought that Christian was a noun, a person looking for authenticity. I never understood that idea that a band could be Christian or something could be Christian. But it just can be and is.
