If the church wants to follow Jesus into the world, we must begin by looking in our town, in our community, and in our neighborhood for the places that are dark and sin-filled. We must have the courage and the faith to see those places and those people set free from their slavery to sin in the kingdom of darkness and redeemed into the peace and love of the kingdom of light.

There is no place off limits.

There is not place that is too sinful.

There is no place that is too corrupt.

The raging fire of the Gospel of Jesus can overcome and outshine any darkness, any sin, any corruption.

The Power of Redemption

I believe that the church has not yet begun to understand the power of redemption. Jesus wants not just to redeem every person on earth, but every place and event as well. Through redemption, Jesus not only transforms and rescues you and I, but also pagan holidays, wicked places, torn nations, and corrupt governments.

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Following Jesus into freedom will look different in different situations, with different people, who live in different cultures, all of whom have different gifts, desires, strengths, abilities, and who seek to love and serve different neighbors and people in different communities.

But it doesn’t need to be anything grand. Despite our culture’s propensity toward going big and making a splash, most methods of advancing God’s kingdom of freedom and love begins with doing whatever you can, wherever you are, with the people who are around you right now, using whatever you have.

Following Jesus does not require big budgets and bigger buildings. It begins with something small. An act of kindness. A word of forgiveness. A smile. A willingness to cross the street, to strike up the conversation, to ask someone how they are doing and not take “Fine” as an answer.

Following Jesus means that we have the liberty and freedom to explore new ways of doing ministry with new types of people.

Traditional Church Lets Millions of People Down

While the traditional ways are tried and tested, they still let a lot of people slip through the cracks. There are millions of people in our cities and states that will never be loved or served by the traditional ways of church.

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Not only will followers of Jesus be characterized by love, and dying to self, they will also be living examples of freedom and redemption. Jesus Christ came to this earth, not to bring us into greater bondage and enslavement, but to set us free, and to give us life.

Many people feel that following Jesus and obeying God is too restrictive, and that God only wants to destroy our lives and give us a list of commands and instructions to follow.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is sin that enslaves and destroys life. It is bondage to sin and addiction to things of this world that make us less than human. Jesus came to make us more human, more alive, and more free.

Follow Jesus into Freedom

So when followers of Jesus go out into the world to reveal Jesus to others, they must go out in a way that is compelling and beautiful. We should be the most joyful, colorful, happy, humorous, carefree, lively, and hopeful people the world has ever seen; not dour and humorless as we generally appear.
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It is good that we are excited to get to heaven and spend eternity with God, but we must do more than sing and pray while we wait to get there. While we wait for Jesus to return, we love and serve others, and thus bring glory to the God of the universe.

Many of us cannot wait to die so we can be glorified; God cannot wait for us to start living so He can be glorified. The church is willing to die, but only to die physically so we can “go to a better place” to be with God. This is not glorifying to God, but glorifying to death.

Christoph Blumhardt said that “If all we aspire to is to get out of this world in order to be free in the next, then we pay tribute to sin and death” (Action in Waiting, 192).

God wants us to die while we are living. He wants us to die to ourselves while we are alive so that before we “go to a better place” we can help this world become a better place as well.

Jesus came to this earth not only to help bring us to heaven, but also so that He could bring heaven down to earth. The inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven was a central theme of Jesus’ life and teaching, and He wants us to continue on with the task He started, of bringing the rule and reign of God to the dark and sinful places on earth.

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Many people today recognize that the church is dying, and so they do everything they can to pump new life back into it. “We need nicer buildings,” they say. “Better trained pastors. Exciting children’s programs. Lively music. More money.” But no matter which measurement you use, none of it seems to be working.

Robert Farrar Capon said it best when he wrote this:

The church can’t rise because it refuses to drop dead. The fact that it’s dying is of no use whatsoever: dying is simply the world’s most uncomfortable way of remaining alive. If you are to be raised from the dead, the only thing that can make you a candidate is to go all the way into death. Death, not life, is God’s recipe for fixing up the world.

Many Christians, of course, look forward to dying. We love to quote what Paul wrote in Philippians 1:21: “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Yes, many Christians say they are ready to die, for that means they get to enter heaven and spend eternity with God and all their loved ones, free from pain, sin, suffering, and temptation.

When my youngest daughter was four, we were sitting at the dinner table one night when she said, “Daddy, I hope I die soon so I can go to heaven to be with Jesus.” Those are shocking words to hear from a four year old, but they reflect the theology of most Christians, and probably what we had inadvertently taught her ourselves. I tried to explain to her that being with Jesus is not about dying, but about living. It is not about the future by-and-by, but the present here and now. “I hope you live a very long time,” I told her, “so that you can show the love of Jesus to those who do not know that He loves them.”

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