This Sunday

From the Multi Hat Pastor:

The late David Foster Wallace is one of the most celebrated literary minds of our generation.

He wrote, “…Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.  This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

This Sunday, my job is to show that this great thinker has accurately captured the modern mindset and yet this way of thinking is 100% opposite of what Jesus teaches.  Deciding what has meaning and what to worship actually leads to bondage.  Meanwhile, Truth is bedrock, it is outside of us, it doesn’t change based on our opinion, it is a person named Jesus.

Its a tough sell in a culture obsessed with autonomy and personal freedom.  True freedom isn’t getting to live for self or doing whatever you want or defining your own reality.  True freedom according to Jesus and Paul, is more like “freed from.”  Freed from bondage, from obsession with self, from having to define your own reality.  Freedom is really freed from.

Paradoxically, embracing captial-T truth that Foster Wallace rejects actually gives us freedom.

The modern struggle of active, passionate Christianity in this culture is to show that true freedom is not found in autonomy and self definition, but is rather found in handing our very autonomy over to Christ.  And this struggle comes to its pinnacle on Easter Sunday.  Happy Easter everyone.  I pray that you’ll BRING IT with clarity, power and much celebration this Sunday.