"Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see."

—Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

I don’t think anyone saw this coming. Maybe a few had an inkling, but for the most part, no one knew 2020 would be like this. What a great reminder that only God knows the future, and therefore only God knows how to prepare you for the future. I love those words by Corrie Ten Boom, and they always come to mind when facing challenges, hardship, or situations I wouldn’t choose. I think: This is preparation for a future that only God can see.

Today I want to share with you a few experiences that gave me a heightened sense of urgency about The Second Mile, and why we need to be prepared. Join me here for Episode 4…

The Second Mile can be summed up fairly simply: Whatever is unfairly required, demanded, or taken—joyfully give even more. That’s the spiritual secret to lifelong freedom, the secret to breaking the power of injustice, the secret to living above the fray of unfairness. Super simple.

Also, it seems, totally backwards.

But isn’t that exactly how Jesus’ kingdom is? Jesus came to give what everyone desires: life. 

But, strangely enough, this life comes at a cost—death. 

His death brought eternal life, and we also find life by losing ours. No less than six times throughout the gospels we see Jesus presenting this surprising path to life:

If there was ever a repeated theme in all four gospels, this is it! He’s reminding us again and again that this new life he’s giving isn’t found through a few small behavior modifications. Jesus knows that we’ll never be truly free as long as we’re content to tinker around with our inner person, tweaking this or that, busying ourselves with small adjustments while keeping him at arm’s length. His outrageous claims demand our absolute attention and an honest self-evaluation: Am I willing to die in order to live?

Join along for an honest conversation about this surprising path to life in Episode 3… here

I’ve been following Jesus (closely or distantly) since childhood, for about 35 years. For most of those years, I shunned the most obvious sins—10 Commandment stuff: sexual immorality, lying, stealing, cursing, that sort of thing. When wronged or hurt, I responded with general kindness. I didn’t gossip, backbite, throw a fit, or respond hatefully. I was a speaker and Bible teacher, a pastor’s wife, a homeschool mother of 2, a graduate of seminary. I had taught scores if not hundreds of Bible studies. 

But if you had, figuratively speaking, viciously slapped me across the face, if you had sued me for absolutely no reason and taken the very clothes off my back, if you had unfairly forced me to humiliating and exhausting work that was actually YOURS to do, in short if you would have attacked me in some way… I would’ve done exactly what virtually every Christian counselor would have told me to do and what most well-meaning Christian friends would tell me to do:

I would’ve stood up for myself. I probably would’ve couched it in Christian terms, of course. Something like: I know my identity and I’m a daughter of the king so I don’t have to be treated like this.

This feels an awful lot like the world’s wisdom, doesn’t it? Something along the lines of: Get even. Fight back. Stand up for yourself.

I think there’s a reason we gravitate to this option—there’s actually a strong biblical case for this call-down-fire Christianity. 

In fact, it’s possible to know Jesus, even walk beside Jesus, and still react to offenses the exact same way as the world. A few of Jesus’ disciples did exactly this.

Today we talk about call-down-fire Christianity, what eventually transformed Jesus’ followers, and what will transform us …

https://www.karipatterson.com/podcast-02-call-down-fire-christianity/

In this very first podcast episode, Kari introduces the Second Mile — Jesus' surprising strategy for responding to unkindness and unfairness of all kinds. Learn about our hard-wired justice-meter, and how to tune it to what is TRUE.

https://www.karipatterson.com/podcast-01-2020d/

Original podcast episode notes:

I got 2020’d again.

Have you heard this phrase? Or maybe its variant: 2020 strikes again. I don’t usually like wide-stroked painting of an entire year, but I have to admit if there was a year that deserved to be a verb, it’s 2020. It has like it’s one thing after another.

Honestly? I think more is in store. I think now is the time to figure out what to do with everything we didn’t ask for. Unkind people. Mistreatment. Unfair situations. Frustrations and disappointments.

Today’s the day, we’re diving in–what to do with everything you didn’t ask for, and a little bit about our hard-wired Justice-Meter.