thesoulpurposedotorg

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction to the gospel according to Luke in the Message Bible :

“Most of us, most of the time, feel left out – misfits. We don’t belong . . . One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are “in” and others are “out” . . . The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

“Nowhere is this price more terrible that when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, or shrinking that vast human community to a “membership.” But with God there are no outsiders.

“As Luke tells this story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who hasn’t felt it?) Now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.”