Vineyard Church of Knox County
Breakthrough of True Life
Sermon Audio from Sunday, March 19, 2006 — "What is true life and how do I find it?" This question is a fundamentally human question, a question that crosses cultures and languages, continents and centuries. Every human who stops to think about his/her life asks this question, What does it mean to truly live? And, How do I find that true life?
Inherent in that question is the belief that, as William Wallace said in the movie Braveheart, “All men die, but not all men truly live.” Not everyone enters the true life; not everyone truly lives. Some die long before their body gives up. Life is lived day-to-day, without truly living. Others seem to have a depth, a quality of the eternal, about them.
What is this eternal kind of life and how do I live it? That’s the question.
People search for this true life in books and celebrities, in other people and within themselves. It may surprise you to know that Jesus of Nazareth had a few good things to say about living the eternal kind of life. Now, I say that tongue-in-cheek, but I also believe that many Christians today hold a view of Jesus as someone who doesn’t have a lot of good advice in how to live on earth. Jesus, many understand, is mainly the unique Son of God who died on the cross for my sins in order for me to be forgiven and to open the door for me to go to heaven when I die. That is, the crux of Jesus’ life and death is for when I die, not for life now. Jesus’ role is as a sacrifice for my sins, not as wise teacher whose life I can enter now. Eternal life is seen as a life that begins when we die, not as a life that can and should be entered right now.
The problem is that we have been obsessed with this idea that the real issue is “making the cut” to get to heaven. We have taken the present life of discipleship out of the conversation. Once you have been forgiven, you still have to live. Jesus is about the redemption of actual life from actual sin.
Jesus matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness to their lives. He comes where we are, and he brings us the (true) life we hunger for. An early report reads, “Life was in him, life that made sense of human existence” (John 1:4).
We’ve been studying the Gospel of Mark and learning how the Kingdom of God is the center of the Christian life and message. Today’s passage is a collection of lessons from Jesus that reveal the Kingdom life that is available to each person, a life that has of it the scent of the eternal. Those who enter it truly live.
