It's my lifeThe Apostle Paul:
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
Your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Col 3:3)Each of us rolled out of bed this morning in pursuit of one of these visions of reality or the other. Either this life is my shot at joy and glory, or the next is. No third option.
If the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. (2 Cor 5:2)
To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. (Rom 2:7)
But it is easy to contrast Bon Jovi's expression of the world's pursuit of glory with the Bible's without recognizing what is so wonderfully right about it.
Jon Bon Jovi is made in the image of God. There is a quest for glory in him that in his fallenness is diseased and thus self-directed, but the healing of that fallen impulse is not to cut off all pursuit of glory but to redirect it from Self to Christ.
Bon Jovi doesn't want to sludge his way through life. He wants to matter. As he should. Life is frighteningly short and he wants to seize the moment. Even, in his own twisted way, redeem the time. He eschews normalcy.
For you believers who want to play it safe--just make it through life offending as few people as possible, being liked, not stepping on toes, not bothering anyone and not being bothered--you have something to learn from Jon Bon Jovi.
Regeneration is a change from glory-in-self pursuit to glory-in-Christ pursuit, not a change from glory-in-self pursuit to no pursuit of glory at all.
Dane, thank you for this. It's a special gift to a non-Christian to listen to what they're saying, and try to hear the best in it - instead of simply condemning, to try to listen for that warped echo of God's glory. I remember Jim Elliot talking about trying to listen for "the cry of hearts which cannnot understand themselves" - you're doing that here!
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