What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

A friend (the one whose actions convinced the teenage me that Christianity was worth investigating) pointed me to this article, which makes with eloquence some of the points I tried to make on this blog some years ago.

Things like:

"so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives."

or

"The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity... has become less and less fascinating... the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus."

and

"I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)"