Well, all the BE groups have now made it to the NT!  The best part of getting this far is that I've only lost four people from the original sign-ups - in this church, that's quite an accomplishment.  Heck, I think that's quite a good percentage in any church.  People are continuing to to their work outs, this week there were some more folks who didn't do it - but still not enough to trigger the "go home, we're doing two lessons next week" event.  The fact that folks are going out of their way to keep doing these work outs, and being creative in how they go about it, is the most encouraging thing so far for me.

I believe that next Sunday will be a key even in the progress of BE, and will start my thought process over who's really "getting" it.  I've often said that for BE to be considered a success in my eyes I'd have to have ten people who really sold themselves out to the idea of being evangelists with their very lives.  Next week will show me who's nearly up that peak - because it's the week where folks are supposed to invite a non-Christian to come and evaluate the consistency of our worship by asking, "How do you think the words of our worship reflected the 'feel' of our worship gathering?"  Should be interesting...

One of the things that most struck me is how we tend to be unknowingly conditioned to skip over certain things in the Bible because they don't normally register with us.  An example of this happened when we read, Luke 9:1 - 6 (NLT).  In this passage Jesus sent out his disciples to preach the message of the Kingdom (language which didn't come naturally to the groups I worked with), and he empowers his disciples to do this by two means.  Not one person in the three groups I worked with picked up on the authority Jesus gave his disciples.  Rather, they focused on the "practical" matters of what to bring, where to stay, and what do to if they were not welcomed.  Now, these things also were to reflect the message of the Kingdom - but they aren't at the heart of what Jesus told them to be doing.  Instead the disciples were supposed go out healing the sick and releasing people from the power of demonic oppression.  I had drag folks to see that, it was amazing how their minds just tended to skip over that part.  Now, I'm not knocking the folks that missed it.  Like I said, they've been unknowingly conditioned to have a blind spot there because in the modern world belief in miracles is only for the whacky and we don't want to be them - but we miss an important theological point with this blind spot.

Why does Jesus link the spreading of the Kingdom with these two acts of "authority?"  Ever wonder about that?  Well, I think it's because in the healing of the sick (overcoming death) and in the casting out of demons (removing a serious obstacle to haveing a relationship with the Lord) Jesus is telling his disciples to show the world that his Kingdom is about reversing what we commonly call "the curse" of Genesis 3.  We used to live in a "garden" in the presence of the Lord, without disease and death being able to break that relationship - and, in some ways, Jesus' Kingdom is about a return to that place (the Book of Revelation picks up on this theme by placing the "Tree of Life" in the New Jerusalem).   It was neat to see people's eyes opened up to this important theological point!

It was also nice to be able to draw the direct link between what Jesus tells his followers to do in the two passages read for Week 6 and the distinctives we looked at in the Tanakh.  It's the same thing, only now it's perfectly exemplified in the Lord Jesus Christ in whose image we walk.  Great stuff!

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