"Maybe the world breaks on purpose"

On Friday my good friends, Jay and Laurie Lorenzen, came over to our house for a back deck meeting with a few friends to talk about a Four Chapter Gospel presentation he’d been working on while in Haiti. (Click on link to see / hear Jay Jay Loenzen\’s Thicker Gospel )A thicker, 4-Chapter gospel begins w/ God making everything beautiful. Chapter two is about sin–Sin, man’s rebellion against God changes everything. Nothing is the way it is supposed to be. Our relationship with God, self, others and creation itself was marred. Chapter 3 is about redemption through Jesus. Colossians 1:19 reminds us that everything that was lost in the Fall was redeemed at the cross. Chapter 4 is about restoration–that God is inviting us to partner with him to restore all the areas of our world that are broken…that Jesus died to restore. Here is where we submit to the King and join him in the adventure of restoration. I like Reggie McNeal’s definition of “missional,” which fits well here: “The people of God, partnering with God,in his redemptive mission in the world.” I’ve been thinking for a while now (and wrote about it in The Externally Focused Quest) that for everything that is broken in the world, God has put within people the desire to fix it…to restore it… to save it. “Maybe the world breaks on purpose so we have work to do.” Some people want to save people, others want to save souls and others want to save the planet. Wanting to restore what is brokens is just part of the way God made us. N.T. Wright in Simply Christian says that every human being hears for echoes of God’s voice. Each human being has a desire for spirituality, relationships, justice and beauty. They want to be part of making things right because they feel, “it just shouldn’t be this way. Good theology is found in the Scriptures but it is illustrated in real life. Take a look at this YouTube video (produced by Levi Strauss) and see how it fits within your kingdom theology.