Another Dose of Peterson

One can never have too much of Eugene Peterson. May this quote from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places stay your mind on Jesus (pp144-45):

When things go wrong, whether at home or in society, in church or in government, it is easy to find a moral reason: disobedience or ignorance of the biblical commandments is obviously at the root of a lot of what is wrong with the world. We conclude that if only we can educate our children and our parents, our politicians and our professors, our business leaders and our celebrities in right thinking and right behavior, things will improve dramatically.

But the moment this becomes our basic orientation for dealing with what is wrong with the world, we have turned our backs on the cross of Christ, on Jesus as our Savior. The moment the moral life defines our way of life we turn our backs on most of what is revealed in our Scriptures, refuse to admit the presence of God in what is happening around us (history), but worst of all, refuse to deal with the most significant thing we know about Jesus, having replaced the real Jesus with a crude, one dimensional cardboard cutout. It amounts to a defiant denial of Jesus. We place ourselves in a position to receive Jesus' most serious rebuke: "Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things" (Matt 16:24). When we rip the moral life from the living context of the Christ life, pull it up by the roots from the nourishing, loamy soil of Scripture, we end up holding a withered, drooping, and finally dead flower, a cut flower.

With that said, check out Kim Riddlebarger's latest post entitled "The Triumph of Thomas Paine?".