SERMON                                                                                                                         “God's Furious Love”

Second sermon in a series,

titled, “The Ragamuffin Gospel”

1.       A small, but powerful enemy of love:  “IF”.

2.       Unconditional love — AGAPE — does not ask:

§         What is IN IT FOR ME?

§         WHEN?

§         HOW FAR?

3.       Love is the best MOTIVATOR.

Excerpts from The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning
Multnomah Publishers

1)   “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”

2)   Grace is opposed to what is owed.

3)   A person who thinks of God as a loose cannon firing random broadsides to let us know who’s in charge will become fearful, slavish, and probably unbending in his or her expectations of others.  If your God is an impersonal, cosmic force, your religion will be noncommittal and vague.  The image of God as an omnipotent thug who brooks no human intervention creates a rigid lifestyle ruled by puritanical laws and dominated by fear.

      But trust in the God who loves consistently and faithfully nurtures confident, free disciples.  A loving God fosters a loving people.  “The fact that our view of God shapes our lives to a great extent may be one of the reasons Scripture ascribes such importance to seeking to know him.”

4)   Justification by grace through faith means that I know myself accepted by God as I am.  When my head is enlightened and my heart is pierced by this truth, I can accept myself as I am.  Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind-games, or pop psychology.  It is an act of faith in the God of grace.

5)   Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure.

6)   The God who flung from His fingertips this universe filled with galaxies and stars, penguins and puffins, gulls and gannets, Pomeranians and poodles, elephants and evergreens, parrots and potato bugs, peaches and pears, and a world full of children made in His own image, is the God who loves with magnificent monotony.

      And anyone who has experienced the love of the Lord of the Dance will tell you: the synonym for monotonous is not boring.

7)   As the French philosopher Maurice Blondel said: “If you really want to understand a man, don’t just listen to what he says but watch what he does.”

      One of the mysteries of the gospel tradition is this strange attraction of Jesus for the unattractive, this strange desire for the undesirable, this strange love for the unlovely.

8)   Whatever past achievements might bring us honor, whatever past disgraces might make us blush, all have been crucified with Christ and exist no more except in the deep recesses of eternity, where “good is enhanced into glory and evil miraculously established as part of the greater good.”

9)   The sinners to whom Jesus directed His messianic ministry were not those who skipped morning devotions or Sunday church.  His ministry was to those whom society considered real sinners.  They had done nothing to merit salvation.  Yet they opened themselves to the gift that was offered them.  On the other hand, the self-righteous placed their trust in the works of the Law and closed their hearts to the message of grace.

10)  If Jesus appeared at your dining room table tonight with knowledge of everything you are and are not, total comprehension of your life story and every skeleton hidden in your closet; if He laid out the real estate of your present discipleship with the hidden agenda, the mixed motives, and the dark desires buried in your psyche, you would feel His acceptance and forgiveness.  For “experiencing God’s love in Jesus Christ means experiencing that one has been unreservedly accepted, approved and infinitely loved.”

11)  The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins—including sins of the flesh—that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion…

      The Christian ragamuffin acknowledges with MacBeth: “Life is but a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”  Just as a smart man knows he is stupid, so the awake Christian knows he/she is a ragamuffin.