This is what it's all about

If you’re someone who needs radical change in your life, there is no other way except to confront the most fundamental issue: your separation from the source of all goodness, joy, love, and peace. You must find your way to hope by having faith that these things are not illusions. You need to go further than Albert Camus, who thought they were illusions—something akin to what we might today call cognitive dissonance and coping in the face of the absurd mismatch between desire and reality. This will take some work.

Having intellectual hang-ups about what should really be the chief subject or the main theme of our message is to miss the point entirely. Such hang-ups divide our churches—fine, so be it—but don’t miss the forest for the trees. However you get there, you need to recognize what even Camus calls sin and go further than he does—further even than the Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel—all the way to the Source as revealed in the Word.

So what should you do? It’s not something I can enumerate, or else I’d be doing what I’ve just criticized. Essentially, what we need to do is live in prayer and believe the Word. These are things we must actively pursue. I said this is going to take some work. We can’t remain passive and expect change. We are not in competition with God, so that’s not to say we get credit for the change we experience; God is indeed the source: when we do good, that’s God at work; when we become good, that’s God at work, too.

That’s me in the photo, by the way, and our first daughter.