Benjamin L. Corey

I continued to find myself in a constant process of attempting to deconstruct values that were cultural and replace them with the legitimate teachings of Jesus - no matter how crazy that made me look to the world or Christians around me.

We are rarely conscious of all these things that are killing our faith because they become so enshrined in our belief system. And when we enter into an unexpected process of shedding off those things that we have grown comfortable with... Well, that moment feels like a crisis. It feels like our faith is falling apart. It feels like everything has gone wrong. But I'm convinced it's not a crisis at all, but the birth of a true faith.

When the opening verses of Genesis say that we were created in the image and likeness of God, it is helpful to remember that this means we are actually created in the image and likeness of LOVE. We were created by love. We were created to receive love. We were created to reflect love. Our entire purpose for existing is to love.

We can see that sin is simply anything that disrupts the way life is intended to be. Sometimes we are the ones who do the disrupting; sometimes it's done to us. But never does sin become part of our identity. We are created in the image and likeness of love, and nothing can destroy that.

In this story, we are not God's enemies. We are God's image-bearers and the most precious thing he created. We are not sin but are oppressed by the force of sin. We need saving but not from God or even ourselves--we need saving from all of those many things that interfere with our ability to perfectly reflect and receive love.

Drawing identity from any area other than the source of life is a spiritual death sentence, and worse, it's contagious, because it gives birth to tribalism. However, when we return to our central identity of image-bearers designed to receive love from and reflect love to others, we are naturally invited to shed all of the unloving, fear-based tribal behaviors that come from loyalty to the label.

Unlike the bounded-set approach where we're constantly trying to measure ourselves up to see whether we're in or out, the centered-set paradigm invites us to ask far more simple and profound questions: "Am I moving toward Jesus? Am I moving toward love?

The things that Jesus thought, and the things that Jesus did, were not a clean fit for those whose entire focus had been right thinking or right doing; Jesus was, and still it, altogether different and outside all of our camps and categories.

Through a lens of navigation, then, we can see that "keeping" isn't about having a perfect, linear or flawless journey; keeping is about having a focus point that you want to keep moving toward.

[re: 'keeping the commandments'] I believe that "keeping" speaks more about focus than measuring success on a pass-fail basis. When we keep something, we hold it close to our hearts and allow it to progressively become our object of focus. The action of keeping becomes personal and intimate, not regulated by an outside authority. Whatever we keep becomes an object we love and cherish, and it becomes a center point from which the rest of our lives flow--like a compass.