A DIFFERENT PATTERN

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) wrote, “Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”

The Kingdom is the reign of the Father over all his creation and created ones. The world is not our ruler as much as it would like to be if we choose for it not to be. We must insist that the world become like the Kingdom of God and right there is the conflict of the ages… the world does not desire to be like the Kingdom of God and furiously fights against the idea. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to live in the abnormal troublesome way of following Christ in this slanted and deformed society that is so opposed to the reign of God. Yet, that is what we have been given to do: change the world.

It helps to constantly be reminded ‘the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.’ It helps, but on a lot of days it doesn’t help much. Few want to pay the price for being this different.

“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Jesus