To be a Christian … is to immerse oneself in unstinting fiction making. Jesus’s words “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” to cite a famously ignored example, demand an arduous imaginative act. This deceptively simple line orders me, as I look at you, to imagine that I am seeing not you, but me, and then to treat this imaginative me, alias you, as if you are me. And for how long? Till the day I die! Jesus orders anyone who’s serious about Him to commit the “Neighbor = Me” fiction until they forget for good which of the two of themselves to cheat in a business deal or abandon in a crisis or smart-bomb in a war—at which point their imaginative act, their fiction making, will have turned Christ’s bizarre words into a reality and they’ll be saying with Mother Teresa, “I see Christ in every woman and man.”

—David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays, pp. 63-64

Throughout the evening, I just did what I normally do when in public—size up strangers in my mind as they pass by, writing abridged life stories to explain their every action that I disapprove of. The moment I walk out the front door, this little internal criticizer flickers to life and begins to simmer just beneath the surface, hidden from the sight of my always-vigilant sentry of a conscience. But as I waded through the sea of thousands of people that night, my criticizer must have gotten a bit careless due to the amount of work it had to do, because it broke the surface just long enough for my conscience to spot it and sound the alarm.

And the clarity came to me all at once as I realized this is a terrible habit to have. To reduce a human being from three beautiful and vivid dimensions down to one, dull and faded; to rewrite his biography to read like a coloring book instead of a complex character study that would make Dostoevsky look like Dr. Seuss—a terrible and poisonous habit.

Jesus told a story in Luke 11 about a demon who leaves a man, but decides to return after realizing it has nowhere else to go. Upon arriving, it finds the house clean and orderly—but vacant. So it brings seven other demons with it, and as Jesus says, “the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

I didn’t understand the relevance of this parable until a few weeks ago. Now, I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the subject matter, which is literal demonic possession. But this is a divine perception into the root problem behind habitual sin: the house may be in order, but it’s still empty! No matter how hard we try, we can never just stop doing or quit thinking something, and this is why so many of us give up after repeatedly failing.

No, the only way to overcome these habits is to deliberately push them out of our minds with something else to fill the void—something as good as the habit was bad. An eviction is nothing more than an idle threat if the landlord doesn’t change the locks and rent out to someone else.

And for me, with my demon of criticism, this means chasing away “Well, the choice of food in his shopping cart explains the need for a motorized scooter” with a picture of that person standing right next to me in eternity, in his glorified and perfect body, singing praises to our Creator with notes and scales that don’t exist in this world. It’s very difficult to have wrong thoughts about another person when you understand what they’re made for.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

There are many who are so obviously my neighbor—the misfortunate, the poor, the sick—that I am quick to love them, or at least to want to love them, meanwhile forgetting that this command has another imperative, which is to love each of them as myself. This is one of those occasions where I assume I understand something Jesus said and then don’t give it a second thought.

But it doesn’t mean “treat others the way you would want to be treated.” That’s much too simple when dealing in the subject of love, and Jesus already said it someplace else.

No, it means “treat others the way you treat yourself”. The difference is great. I would be grateful if someone gave me something to eat when I was hungry, so out of empathy I will give food to a food drive. But I will give of my excess, and I don’t have excess of my favorite foods. I will only ever have just enough or not enough of the things I like; I only have too much of what I don’t like.

But is it really loving in the same way as I love myself if I donate my canned beets and sauerkraut, which I hate? Or even that salsa that I bought two jars of because it was on sale, but didn’t end up liking very much? (Is it loving in the same way as I love myself if I carry McDonald’s gift certificates to give to homeless people if they ask for money, even though I myself wouldn’t eat at a McDonald’s?)

I had the opportunity to experience the other side of this the day I volunteered at Hope Ministries last year. They told us in advance that they wanted our group to bring ten cans of soup and ten bottles of water to hand out to the people in the homeless camps by the river—but then at lunchtime they surprised us by making us eat what we had brought instead of the food from the soup kitchen like we planned. I was very surprised as some of the people refused outright, choosing to go hungry rather than eat the food they had brought to donate because it wasn’t good enough.

But isn’t it better to give something than to give nothing? No. The food pantries of the world already have enough canned corn and Hormel chili. What’s important is that my heart is in the right place for service, and if I can’t give my best to the least—if I can’t love them in the same way as I love myself—then I shouldn’t give at all.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan to the Jewish scholar to show that your neighbor meant anyone he was able to show love to. But just like the closed-minded Jew, I lack imagination in understanding who could be my neighbor.

To most Americans of our day, Jesus might have told a parable about the Good Iraqi, who helped a wounded soldier at cost to himself even though his brother had just the week before been killed by stray shrapnel from a round of American freedom-bombing. Just the sort of story that could get Jesus assassinated.

If He was telling the story to me, though—to someone who thought he had a pretty good grasp of what everyone means—it might go something like this:

Two young adults graduated from college and landed good entry-level jobs in their field of study. Finding themselves with more discretionary income than they knew how to spend, and resolving to plant their feet solidly in the middle class, they each bought a house. Now both of them were handy and decided to fix up the houses on their own.

The first went to remodel his bathroom and found that the previous owners had done a very poor job of painting in corners that were out of plain view. Cheap new tile had also been laid to cover up a mildew problem. In the coming weeks he found many other cases like this where the owners had covered up something in haste to make the house appear better than it was.

The second, meanwhile, finishing the basement, found that his house’s electrical wiring had been updated recently, and in doing so, the last owners had made it very easy for him to wire the basement into the main electrical system. In fact, behind every wall he tore down and inside every light fixture he removed, in every part of the house that had been updated, he found that they had taken great care to do everything even above and beyond the minimum requirements of the residential building code.

Now, I ask you: Which of the previous homeowners was a neighbor to the new homeowner?

“What’s mine is mine” – for now, yes, but it won’t always be that way. This is reason enough to respect all kinds of property.

Who then is my neighbor? Anyone who can be affected by my actions, even if I will never meet him or even know his name.

If I doubted my faith, it wouldn’t be due to scientific evidence or philosophical reasoning. The most compelling arguments against my faith are the practical ones, the arguments based on things that can be observed rather than those that can be reasoned.

Christianity is a last resort for desperate people. Most high-profile conversions, like Brian Welch from Korn a few years ago, are due to a person reaching the end of his rope. Alcoholics Anonymous uses a belief in God as a starting point for overcoming an addiction. And many who are terminally ill will turn to religion for the few months they have left. People use the idea of God as a psychological crutch because they are weak and they need something to help them cope with the darker side of life.

Christianity is not rational. It is an unnecessary cure for a fabricated disease. Sin can easily be explained in purely natural terms as our survival instinct. Animals are greedy, promiscuous and even murderous, and we don’t call it sin. We don’t really need to be “saved” from anything – we just need to abandon the concept of sin and quit feeling bad about what we do.

The Bible isn’t very distinctive from a literary standpoint. In the Old Testament, the poetry is often dull, the prophecies incoherent, and the narrative awkward. Parts of it are wonderful, but maybe 75% of it is skippable. If God wrote a book, couldn’t he have done a better job?

The Christian view of the world is too narrow. Christians set up camp on a hill overlooking a valley; the intellectual elite—scholars, leaders and artists—are always climbing higher up the mountain, and from that vantage point they can see that there is much more to the world than that valley. To them, the Christian worldview is something to be passed through, not stopped at. In other words: those who are inside the box of religion are afraid to go outside, but those who make it outside never want to go back in.

How do I answer these objections? The poem in Philippians 2 is the key to everything:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
    taking the very nature of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

If our faith isn’t always rational, consider that it wasn’t rational for the Creator of the universe to die for his creations.

If our faith is especially attractive to the lowly and weak, consider that when the God of the universe became a baby, he could not even hold his head up on his own.

If the Bible is not distinctive, consider that Jesus was born to poor parents in a filthy stable in an unimportant town in an oppressed nation.

If our faith is not taken seriously by the rich, the powerful, and the intellectuals, consider that Jesus’ birth was announced only to a group of shepherds.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
    ”I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE,
    AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD.”

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The word kenosis comes from the Greek word for “emptiness”, and it refers to the idea that Jesus emptied himself of his divine glory and dignity in order to be incarnated as a human. He gave it all up so that he could become what he wanted to save. Even apart from his words and actions, the very nature of Jesus Christ’s incarnation shows us how we should conduct ourselves as Christians.

We follow a foolish faith. We are fools for believing it. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise! His wisdom is above all others, but it is not merely an enhanced version of our own; it is altogether different.

And God, in his wisdom, engineered a world in which faith and trust are valued above all else. He will never allow his existence to be proven; he’s given enough evidence to satisfy those who already believe, but not enough to convince those that do not, so that it is impossible to reach him without faith.

If you require proof in order to believe, you will never find it, but if you believe first, you will find that you have all the proof you need. And this is foolishness.

Despite its age, it holds a battery charge for a week, and gets reception in places you wouldn’t believe. It has been dropped a few times, but you couldn’t tell from looking at it. It has never caused her a problem.

Meanwhile, Joel is on his third RAZR in six months. Look at how far cellular technology has progressed in the last few years: We now have hand-held phones that play music, take pictures, and fall apart if you shake them too hard.

How quickly we abandon quality for convenience. It’s not hard to see in our culture. Even though the food at McDonald’s or Taco Bell is a nutritional nightmare, it’s fast and cheap; low-quality and overpriced digital downloads have replaced the crystal clarity of CD audio; wireless technology is dominant, even though it is unreliable and slow compared to wired alternatives.

It has permeated every aspect of our culture – technology, environmentalism, art, relationships, and perhaps more inconspicuously, religion.

Because when it comes down to it, Jesus is inconvenient. He is impractical. He always seems to get in the way of my affairs, reminding me that the harder road is usually the right one, or telling me that I am not worthy of Him if I love anything else more than Him.

Jesus is inconvenient, and so those who do not have Him do not want Him, and those of us who do have Him are usually guilty (to varying extents) of trading the real Jesus for an innocuous, manufactured version of Himself. We do this by taking certain of His sayings seriously while ignoring others that do not fit into our already-established lifestyle. Make him white; make him handsome; make him political; make him tolerant. This plastic jesus is convenient because he agrees with us, but he is fragile and easily broken.

But the thing about Jesus – the inconvenient, real Jesus – is that He is forgiving. No matter how many times I exchange the truth of God for the lie that I can find happiness in anything but Christ, I am still His missing son. He lovingly awaits my return, and when I do find my way back into His arms, He throws a celebration party.

This is the Jesus I will always come back to.

1. “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye.” (Luke 6:41-42)

I always thought of Jesus saying this in a stern, almost reprimanding way. But doesn’t this fit the words better? Given his reputation as a winebibber (Luke 7:34, NKJV), he had to have at least known how to entertain a crowd.

2. “Unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:3)

This is the source of the turn or burn attitude that many have adopted toward unbelievers, especially in the last 50 years. But I don’t think Jesus was ominously threatening hell on those who didn’t accept him. He was telling them the truth, but with love and genuine concern.

3. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men.” (Luke 18:11-12)

This is the opposite of #1: in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, I tend to imagine a caricature of the Pharisee, speaking in a fake British accent with exaggerated hand gestures. Because of this, I immediately identify myself with the tax collector—a grateful sinner saved by grace—and the purpose of the parable is lost on me. But when I imagine the Pharisee praying sincerely to God in plain speech, it hits much closer to home. Jesus didn’t criticize him for the way he prayed, but for the content of his prayer.

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

—C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, pp. 29-31

One day as we listened, Matt’s nine-year-old son Ben, in his refreshing youthful transparency, said what Matt and I were both thinking: “These guys aren’t very good.”

It was true. The sound mix was unbalanced, the singers were off-key, and the music had no dynamics. As two musicians on their way to play in their own church band, it was easy for us to be critical. Yes, we sometimes made mistakes during our set, and we weren’t always together, but we definitely didn’t sound that bad. And if we did, we wouldn’t let ourselves be broadcast on the radio for the whole city to hear.

In David James Duncan’s modern masterpiece The Brothers K, the narrator, Kincaid, recounts a story from his fictional childhood. At his church was a girl named Vera. She was a harelip, which is a slang term for someone with a cleft lip, and this gap in her lip caused a severe speech impediment. One day at the end of Sunday school, she volunteered to give the closing prayer.

Vera’s passion is juxtaposed with her garbled speech as she prays: “Oh nYeesus! Nyearest nLord! How snorely nwee need nthy mresence!” Kincaid describes how the rest of the kids began to laugh and mockingly repeat her words (“Snorely!”), but that her determination was unwavering. She continued to pray with fervency to Jesus alone, with no regard for anyone around her, her words almost unintelligible, even as the Sunday school teacher tried unsuccessfully to cut her off.

Let me pause and consider where I could take this. I could say that the band on the radio had the musical equivalent of a speech impediment, a cleft lip, and the lesson to be learned is that it doesn’t matter how talented you are as long as your heart is in the right place.

But that’s not the point I want to make. Not exactly.

I have to go a step farther and say that God Himself fills the chair of Kincaid in that story, and that every last one of us, without distinction, is Vera. No matter how eloquently we may speak or how beautifully we may sing, it’s all impedimented in the ears of a perfect God. It’s only our delusion that makes us believe we are better than anyone else.

Those mornings on our way to church, Matt and I got a small taste of what our band must sound like to Him. I’ve come to realize since then that what we do often obscures who we are, and that the only true test of substance is to burn away all the layers of talent so that we are as God sees us: off-key, harelipped. When we played poorly, was it still evident that we were worshipping God? If our talent was lifted from us, would there be anything left?

I’m all the time being asked by people, “How do you feel closer to God?” And I kind of always want to say, “I don’t know.” When I read the lives of most of the great saints, they didn’t necessarily feel very close to God. When I read the Psalms I get the feeling like David and the other Psalmists felt quite far away from God for most of the time. Closeness to God is not about feelings. It’s about obedience. … I don’t know how you feel close to God. And no one I know who seems to be close to God knows anything about those feelings either. I know if we obey, occasionally the feeling follows. Not always, but occasionally. I know that if we disobey, we don’t have a shot at it.

Jesus said, “Whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you’ve done it unto me”, and that is what I’ve come to think: if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my Savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor.

This, I know, will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved, and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.

—Rich Mullins, from a concert in Lufkin, TX on July 19, 1997, two months before he was killed in a car accident