6 The Hope and the Challenge
6.1. Learned Hopelessness
In the 1960s, Martin Seligman shocked dogs via their cage floors. Of course, they hated it.
But when they realized they had no option, because the door was locked, they gave up trying to escape. And even when he opened the door later, the dogs still lay down and stayed inside.
They had learned to be hopeless. They had the chance to be free, but they had stopped hoping, stopped trying. They changed their worldview to accommodate nothingness and “getting by.”
6.2. Don’t Be Tricked: The Why’s of Daily Life Matter
Modern Christianity has mostly caught the same contagious disease. The same people who taught you to dress up on a holy day that doesn’t exist in the Bible, and didn’t exist during the days of Jesus or His apprentices, or for 300 more years… the same people who brought you Mardi Gras and Halloween and Santa and the Easter Bunny… have told you that the System is all that exists.
They believe nothing better is possible. If they can’t trick you into believing what they’re doing is actually in the Bible, they will try the sus “first century only” line, or catfish you with “today’s culture is different.” Well, duh. Every culture and time, country and decade have a different culture, to some extent. Big deal. What is the FORCING FUNCTION, the priorities that drive day-to-day decisions? What is Jesus’ CHARACTER in the culture? The look and feel may differ, but NEVER will apathy, leaven, worldliness, vanity, and attendance-clergy-based religion ever be an “acceptable” culture, in any generation or nation.
Some want us to believe, “It’s not rrrreally loving the world to primarily think about, talk about, spend massive money on, plan, befriend, and spend energy mostly on the world, while eating up entertainment, social media, gaming, and dark friendships.”
But “what if” instead, our priority is daily Life woven daily together with Jesus’ People and Purposes in the CONTEXT of “in the world but not of the world.” What if an outsider really would describe what he witnesses as everyone, “from the least to the greatest” not needing anyone chasing them down with the old Spiritless Covenant of, “Know the Lord, know the Lord.” What if “ALL the believers were one in heart” daily and lived Jesus’ priority for the planet, “As you rise up, sit down, and walk along the way.” This has ALWAYS been God’s Way, exemplified in His Life and teaching, and the life and teaching of His apprentices. The Ecosystem. That Changes everything.
6.3. System Defenders and Name-Calling
Those “church”-going yet still “Unsaved Christians” (book by Dean Inserra, 2019) are prone to believe “the old is better,” as Jesus said about “Old Wineskins,” that shape that contains the Wine, the crushed fruit of God’s Vine.
“No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
Attendance and clergy are safer, familiar, convenient, and accommodating to their preferred lifestyle of clothing, travel, wealth, friends, time, biological family preferences, and entertainment choices.
There’s not much time for Jesus Life in that. “That’s for Sunday, even if that concept is not in the Bible. It’s okay. All that commitment, take up your cross, die to the world and the world to you—that alien, stranger, sojourner stuff—was for the first century.”
It will likely be those “Unsaved Christian” attendance folks, or the clergy-class, who will call you names if you go beyond worldliness and “walk as Jesus walked” or expect them to do so.
“The stone the BUILDERS rejected, Jesus personifying His Truth, the Word, has become the chief Cornerstone.”
An older new brother, baptized in a river in Michigan two hours ago today, is living for Jesus and His daily Ecosystem now. He said he’s likely now, after years of high-level religion that ruined his life, to be accused of belonging to a cult—because religious folks who default to calling names, C.U.L.T. — “Can’t Understand Life Together.” Insightful guy.
That name-calling is the “Saul Alinsky tactic” (look up Saul’s “Rules for Radicals” of how to destroy opposition when you can’t prove your own point convincingly). It remains the strategy of those who want power, prestige, and pesos—in politics, in the media, or in “religion.”
6.4. Don’t Stay in the Cage
And so many, like Seligman’s Dog, keep sitting in the cage, the religion that Jesus never started nor endorsed, even when the Door to something far more amazing, just lit, is wide open.
6.5. Real Christianity: POWER!
Jesus did not come to improve the System, Judaism, or any other religion before or after. Jesus ain’t “one of many roads up the mountain” alongside the other roads.
He Created the Mountain. And “casts mountains into the Sea.” Mohammed never claimed it, Buddha can’t even stand up, and… you get the idea.
And as I said to a Harvard Graduate School Director, “Just because humans here and there—the Dalai Lama, Plato, Shakespeare, Buddha, and others—can plagiarize from what Jesus wrote into the Operating System of the planet and its inhabitants, doesn’t mean they are equals to their Maker. Quoting Him is great. Claiming ownership of His Wisdom is cheating.”
He wrote the Book of Life. And He promised His Spirit—not to create a System of placating rituals, but to make us an extension of Himself:
- “Rivers of living water.”
- “Tasting the powers of the coming age.”
- “Joy inexpressible and full of Glory.”
- “Peace that transcends understanding.”
- “Christ IN you, the hope of Glory.”
Where is that?
Where is THAT Christianity? It was always meant to be THE Christianity. Let’s go there! It’s Built in the Ecosystem of daily Life together, in the midst of big-time careers, stellar university performance, amazing parenting, superstar athletes, ALL of that, WITHIN the Ecosystem, not instead of the Ecosystem.
If your life does not contain those things listed above—if they’re poetry but not reality, and no one around sees anything like that in you—then something is seriously lost for Jesus’ Intent for His actual church, and the world. The attendance thingy is everywhere, but it isn’t Right, or Effective. It’s not even Effective for most of our own children. How very sad. But the naïve or guilty excuse it with a slogan from Satan himself. “They have to sow their wild oats. They HAVE to damage or destroy their lives forever. They have to.”
Humans’ experience is NOT the measure, or limit, of what is True and Possible in Jesus.
6.6. The Issue
The issue is:
Not with Jesus.
Not with the Scriptures.
But with the System.