A New Law

One artist I am especially looking forward to seeing at LifeLight this weekend is Derek Webb. Derek used to play in Caedmon's Call but now has a successful solo career. Derek is a very deep thinker and uses his lyrics and the stage as a platform to talk about his faith and how that collides with the world. He never ceases to challenge me and I find myself listening to his cd "Mockingbird" at least once a week.

I recently preached about a song he wrote called "A New Law". The song speaks of the church trading the old law, the Old Testament Law that so often weighed down the Israelites in a life of rules and regulations, for a new set of laws. Churches today tend to create all sorts of rules and regulations for themselves that are typically far from the gospel of Jesus Christ. We teach that you must think a certain, or not at all, and we tend to emphasize things that are not as important as others, like the type of music you should listen to, homosexuality, etc.

Jesus came to offer a life of freedom. Paul writes in Galatians 5, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." Christ speaks of overturning an old way of doing life, a life of bondage. He uses all sorts of phrases like "you have heard it said" to show a new way of following God.

I pray that I will be the kind of person who will honestly seek out the truths of Scripture and will seek to follow Christ with all I am. I pray that I will take Christ for his word and not make his gospel anything it was never meant to be. I pray that the church will get serious about being the Body of Christ, His bride. I pray that Christians will get serious about the kind of life Jesus has called us all to, the abundant life.