Day 01: It's not about you

Book drying out nicely. The opening sentence is a great starting point although the rest of the day's reading does seem to concentrate on 'fulfillment'. I think we have to be fair here and ask who is the intended reader in the mind of the writer. I would guess, at this point, that he is addressing a generation of Christians and non-Christians who have been taught by 'sermon and song' that 'it IS all about me'. This 'it's not about you' may come as a shock to many 'Christians' as well as to 'non-Christians'.

And yet most of this chapter is 'anthropo-centric'; man centred. This is not necessarily always wrong. (How about that for 'fence sitting'?) We know, according to the scripture, that 'no one is seeking God' (Rom 3:11) and that 'no one' includes Jews and Gentiles. By first instinct we are all 'seeking something FROM God'; this is our creature instinct, we have needs. Christ's claim was that His anointing was to enable him to 'meet needs' (Luke 4:18,19). There is nothing wrong with realising that, as long as we don't slip into the notion that Christ is a solution-dispensing-machine.

One of my favourite older writers is Paget Wilkes who wrote books which usually started with the words "The Dynamic of...". If any reading this can get a copy of "The Dynamic of Service" (or tell me of an online version) I would heartily recommend it. He identifies the conditions of the 'natural man' and shows how God has addressed himself to being an all embracing Saviour.

Although I don't really like the title of the book it is true that all lives are 'driven' and, in fact, they are mostly 'purpose driven' or 'hunger driven'. I am suspicious of the title simply because it sounds as though we are going to substitute one compulsion for another. It is shaping up as an explanation of why we should have a different 'driving force'. That still sounds a bit as if 'it IS all about me'.

Existentialism and its daughter post-modernism claim that life is literally 'meaning-less'. Life is 'non-sense' and purely random. There are no big answers because there are no big questions. There is just life without explanation but, in spite of the media's propagation of these philosophies, there remains a lurking suspicion in the minds of most people that there 'must be' some purpose. For such this chapter is a good starting point.

I can see one issue already surfacing and that is the phrase 'the Bible says' followed by various translations of the scripture. Sometimes it just doesn't!

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