I Just Don't Get It

Shhhh, just in case anyone is overhearing our conversation Jesus; you know this could prove to be a highly combustible outcome for me if any of my colleagues ever caught wind of my actions.
I’m so nervous about my meeting you at this very late and ungodly hour, and yet at the same time my heart is beating not so much with the fears I have, but with something else that has drawn me here. Ever since I heard the voice, I haven’t been the same!

I know you are from God, no man could say and do what you have done without that being so, but, you have to give me something to work with, please. Some principles, precepts or concepts, otherwise I just don’t get it. You know the deal of my having to get back into my mother’s womb is no longer possible, she died a year and half ago, so this being ‘born again’ matter isn’t a viable option anymore is it?
What I see you offering us is a highbred version of Judaism and God knows we need to be revived from the staleness and lifelessness of our air-tight orthodoxy. So, if you could help me to try and fit what you have to offer and make it work within our religious system, I just know after the leaders within the high council get a taste for this new way, they’ll love it!

Nick, you are right, you don’t get it, this isn’t me offering who I am and turning it into another add-on, pin the Jesus onto the lifeless system and jump starting it, I’ve come that you might have life. I haven’t come to make your programs more effective and more attractable to those with a lingering bad taste in their mouths because of religion. Much more to the point, this new wine has to be put into new malleable, supple wine skins, otherwise it is merely trying to make life fit into the rigidness of your already fossilized programmes, the end being a horrible mess.

I woke up this morning with this story playing in my heart and boy does it ever sound like the Nicodemus’s of today, although born-again, trying to replicate what the Nick of old was fixated with trying to make work. “Brother, I, we, just love this grace message you have come to share with us, but, we need to have something more than being ‘wind-blown’ by His spirit, we need some principles, precepts, workable concepts to integrate this vibrant and living message of grace and fit it into our already existing fine church programs.

What we have offered to us in Christ is something so totally unfamiliar to us, our deep fetish of loving rules is an unseen undertow always there like gravity just waiting to pull us under, back into a more secure and knowable way of doing “church.!

Rich