Forget Everything You Knew

Forget everything you ever knew, because I want to invite you into a vision of life that is nothing like anything you’ve seen before. To a place where up is down, down is up, left is right, right is left. I want to show you how to find significance in a place God calls his “Kingdom,” where nothing is the way we find it in our world.

It’s not by chance that C.S. Lewis, a follower of Jesus and member of his Kingdom, set his Narnia in a place beyond the confines of this world. He knew that reality is only to be found when everything we believe about this world is abandoned and we are open to something completely different. God’s Kingdom may not be a Narnia of actual beings, actual snow, actual trees, but it is a genuine realm different from our own, where nothing of what you once knew survives the journey.

If independence from God has made us wrong to the core of our beings, then there must be another world where we can be right. There must be a place, even if it’s a place of heart and mind, where things are the way God intended them to be.

Let me invite you on a tour of that place, the Kingdom of God. You get there by abandoning your independence and making the risen Jesus who died for you the ruler of your life. Once in the Kingdom, you will find magic, because all the things you’ve been searching for are there – meaning, connection, freedom from loneliness, forgiveness, purpose, hope. And reality, a reality so real that you’d swear that this is the first time you’ve ever actually been alive.

Too bad that so many people have trivialized the Kingdom and its leader, Jesus. How sad that we've made him and his world so common. His name is on our lips in moments of anger. We find him at the movies, where we Da Vinci Code him, rewriting him to make him as common as the rest of us, while his reality is left behind in the gutter. He stares at us silently from a million crucifixes. Monuments to his memory are found on many a street corner, tall steeples and stained glass surrounded by parking lots.

The real Jesus was not so common. The real Jesus made those around him more than a little ueasy. Why? Because once and for all he told them what was real. He compelled them, and us, to understand that the things we once thought were so important are nothing in the eyes of the only Person who matters.

He taught us how to make a difference with our lives. In his Kingdom there are no nobodies, no leaves in the wind. In the Kingdom where Jesus lives we find the answers to everything that matters.