Week 8 -- Exhilarating, Pulse Thumping Communion with Christ and His Gospel

Darrel’s bidding to step into the deeper wonder and mystery of God and His plan throttled up my excitement and anticipation for the admin retreat and summer.  

Our training suggests that our opinions particularly negative opinions about God or others are often a mirror of what we dislike about our own behaviors and self perceived inadequacies.

My gut reaction and then follow up “non-gut” reaction throughout the message to the question “What do you do when God disturbs you?” WAS “So in other words, Steve, what disturbs you about yourself?”

The logical ties to this gut/non-gut reactions are ….. I am judgmental. My sin is exceedingly grave. I don’t want solidarity with sinners.  I don’t want to endure life’s highest joy and call -- to bear in my body the sins of my enemies.  

Sooooo …. the message definitely quickened in my heart a hunger to live like Jesus lived and love like Jesus loved.

God used Darrel’s defining of the ultimate solidarity to beckon me to the exhilarating, pulse thumping moment of ecstatic communion via love/blood poured out of me for others.  

A tie to today on this point is my son sitting with his Andrew Luck jersey and telling his friends (who called to play multiple times) repeatedly that they can’t come over because he’s  got to watch the game.  His blood & passion for sport was fueled by a communion with game day.  I felt a similar fusion of nitros and blood when I thought of Christ’s “game day.”  Put another way, I felt the fusion of CROSS DAY and for a brief moment I wanted to be swept up into the spectacle of ULTIMATE SOLIDARITY.  

Here is a paraphrased definition of the ultimate solidarity -- God not only became a human being but the representative human being.  Pilate - here is Jesus the king of the jews. Here is Jesus the human race. The whole sinful human race. God became the millions and million of the unrighteous.