What must we do to reach the kingdom of God? At the very beginning of his earthy ministry, Jesus tells of a great opportunity: God’s kingdom is within our reach. To enter the kingdom, however, we must through a process of repentance and belief. The process can be difficult and challenging. Sometime it is painful. But through this process we learn how. To lay down our lives, pick up the cross, and follow Jesus into the kingdom.
We want to study all the events that led to this crisis with the hope of preventing a similar thing from happening again.
We think what we need to learn our mistake is how not to ever making that mistake again.
We are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Instead of looking back at the event to prevent circumstances from converging in the same way again, we need to look forward to the growth that we can experience from it. Rather than focusing on what we want to leave behind from an experience, we should be proactive about what we want forward from the experience as we move into the next task or relationship or season of our lives.
Doesn’t everyone long for a passionate life? We love passionate and enthusiastic people; they carry something of the nature of God with them. In fact the word enthusiasm derives from a Greek word enthusiasms, that come from entheos, having the god within.
“It’s as though the human heart was created for passion and enthusiasm, yet as we face life’s challenges we can suffer a sequence of losses and disappointment that kill our passion. Missed opportunities, broken relationship, the stresses and strains of life that cause us hurt take their toll.
Eventually we try to protect ourselves and our passion is gradually restrained, starved, and weakened.