As a pastor of, oh let’s see, 19 years I have worked with, read and taught many curriculums. Without question every one of the curriculums I have taught has raised eyebrows in the class somewhere in the course of study.
Recently I was approached by someone who thought I shouldn’t be using a certain curriculum because some of the ideas in it were just plain wrong. It was stated that I should only use curriculum or for that matter read books that were one hundred percent accurate.
We are such all or nothing people and perfectionists at the core. If I followed the advice of my friend I would never read or listen to another person regardless of who they were. Let me tell you I have never found anyone I agree with one hundred percent. I love John Eldredge but sometimes I think he goes overboard on the man thing. I mean, all healing can’t come from embracing your inner man can it? I love John Bevere but sometime I think he is just too black and white. Max Lucado? I Love his writing, too, but sometimes his world seems to clean-cut for me. Now C.S. Lewis may be touted as one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. I have recommended his book Mere Christianity as a must read. But in his last chapter he espouses evolution as a viable theory! Oh yeah and there’s this other guy J.E. Lillie. He is an awesome writer. You should read his stuff. But sometimes after I have read one of his blogs for the third time I want to hit the delete button. 🙂
We don’t live in a world of perfect revelation right now. I’m not even sure when we get to the Thousand Year Reign or Eternity we are going to understand it all. But we certainly don’t get it all at the moment. We all believe that we are right and we are all wrong about that. Only the Bible is perfectly accurate and even that we screw up sometimes because we put our personal spins on it.
Brothers and sisters we are left with this; Agreement will never be one hundred percent. We don’t even have that with God yet. According to John 15:7 that’s why so many of our prayers go unanswered. We aren’t fully on God’s page. So we have to give each other a break .Let the other guy be wrong without kicking him to the curb along with all his ideas.
One of the greatest Christian lessons I have learned is, “Chew the meat and spit out the bones.” I’m not talking about letting heresy into the body of Christ or about Christians embracing Buddhism or anything like that. But I am saying that we have to admit within orthodox thinking there is a lot of room for “opinion” particularly in the way we each choose to do church and even in the way we sometimes look at God and His world.
Let’s focus on what we agree on and on those areas where we truly see God working in us together. Let’s allow for those personal differences to be settled in glory where we will all stand before the throne and say “Aw shucks we were all wrong.” 🙂
Reinventing the We'll 