Have We Lost CHRIST in Christianity?

Dear Fellow Believers:

Our Lord calls us to “love God with all of our mind . . .” The following excerpt is intended to do just that—promote our pondering on a subject that might make us question our Christian assumptions.


It comes from a book by Mike Yaconelli entitled, Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith. The following is only a short portion from his chapter on Wild Abandon, based on Jesus’ call to “lose our life for his sake,” or abandon ourselves to follow Christ. Yaconelli writes: 

Let’s look at children again. 

Little children start their lives unrule-ly, without rules, oblivious to society’s prescribed laws, which, according to the rule makers of our society, exist for children’s and everyone’s good. Eventually children are socialized. Domesticated. They learn how to behave, how to conform to the cultural “norms” for the greater good of society. Children are told that learning the rules, becoming responsible and orderly, and discovering the boundaries of a civilized world are what growing up is all about.

But is it?

Or, in the process of socializing our children to follow the rules, do we rob them of the discernment needed to know when to follow rules and when to break them? Have we robbed our children (including those of us who have grown out of childhood) of the childlike intuition that caused us to know in our hearts how to recognize the Rule Maker? Christianity is the wild religion that has always been more concerned about following Jesus than following the rules of Jesus.

Remember when you said yes to Jesus that first time? You didn’t know all the rules, but you knew Jesus. Sadly, the church immediately stepped in and told us we needed to know more than Jesus; we needed to know the rules of the Christian faith, otherwise we might end up in confusion and spiritual anarchy. The church is always worried we might make a mistake!

Mistakes are the guaranteed consequence of wild abandon. Mistakes are signs of growth. That is why the Old and New Testament are full of people who made mistakes. The church should be the one place in our culture where mistakes are not only expected but welcomed.

Every time the disciples started establishing rules—no children near Jesus; don’t let the crowd touch Jesus; don’t talk to Samaritan women; don’t let people waste expensive perfumes—Jesus told them to knock it off, and His rebuke was usually followed by a lecture that said, “You still don’t get it! We are not substituting religious rules with our rules. We are substituting religious rules with Me!” Jesus kept saying “Follow Me,” not “follow My rules.” So most of us have spent our Christian lives learning what we can’t do instead of celebrating what we can do in Jesus (pp. 52-53). 

Celebrate Jesus, rejoice in Him, not just in an extension of what he has done for you.