St. Andrew Connection Group Podcast

What happens the day after a person accepts Jesus as their savior? While the life of the almost-Christian practices the rituals of religion and tries to be nice to other people, the life of a real Christian is characterized by real love - sacrificial, giving love, which can begin only on the full realization that God has first loved us.

On the surface, asking the question, “are you saved?” seems simple - it is a question about the soul. But at different times, Jesus talks about four different kinds of salvation. That’s because Jesus was concerned with the whole person - heart, mind, soul and strength. Salvation is both for the future, and for right now.

The kingdom of God is not a set of correct opinions or beliefs, nor is it a physical destination in the clouds for us to go to when we die. It is a state of the soul. The overriding message of Jesus, and therefore of the whole Bible, is that in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, the kingdom of God has come. Christianity is a religion of the heart.

We end with the vice of pride, which is the chief of all vices, as it aims to replace faith with self-sufficiency. Our creative impulse is good, and God-given. The secret is to bathe our view of the world in a rightly-ordered vision of creation, as God designed. The result of this right-ordering, and the practice of good habits, is that we end up creating both the desire of our heart (Psalm 37:4-5) and the desire of God, which become one and the same.

To be human isn’t simply to know things, but to be directed toward something. When we’re on the move, we’re alive. This movement and purpose comes from what we want. We are defined not by what we know but by what we desire. Jesus isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into our minds; he is after nothing less than the passionate regions of our hearts. The practice of worship points our hearts in the right direction.

Consumerism is the act of buying something because of the momentary elevation it offers our lives. In a world built on consumption, we can treat our faith as a consumer activity, too. But often, spiritual moments are unsustainable. Instead, God wants a relationship, built on daily habits. In a consumer culture where indulgence leads to a form of spiritual poverty, discover the joy of a restraint that leads to abundance.

Right thinking doesn’t necessarily bring right living. A life of faith truly begins when we are honest about what we want, and discovering what we truly want in life begins in relationship and not detached isolation. We begin to understand God’s desires for our lives as we spend time with others in Christian community, and in talking with God in prayer.

Improving the problems in our lives start not with fixing our beliefs, but changing our behavior. Our actions form our character, which over time shapes our belief. While the conventional wisdom says that we believe then act accordingly, science is learning that we form beliefs out of our actions. We are what we love. Fixing the problems of our lives begins with re-ordering our desires from what the world calls “the good life” to a life oriented around God.