What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Abundant Life and the American Dream

A favorite sound-byte of Jesus' in many corners of the Christian world is from John 10: "I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly."

A glorious and precious promise, to be sure. But it backfires on us if we infuse our own conception of what "abundant life" might look like.

For most Americans, the images that intuitively and most naturally are affiliated with "abundant life" are conflated with the American Dream: a house in the suburbs, 2.5 kids (preferably attending private Christian schools), the upper-middle-management job and the Hummer in the driveway.

But consider this: Jesus makes these promises to an Israelite community who are being occupied by a foreign power...and he does absolutely nothing to permanently change that political-military situation whatsoever. Ergo, the promise of abundant life must be fully applicable to a conquered people whose immediate circumstances were not going to be changed in the least.

We must allow the promises of Scripture to not only captivate us but also to radically re-arrange the furniture of our hopes, dreams, definitions, and plans. Abundant life is an invitation to real life in step with the Spirit of God. That means sometimes it will look like we hoped it would and many times it will not. God will not allow us to be stuck in meaningless life if we will follow him--even and especially the meaninglessness of our own hopes and dreams.

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