You can be living in a big house, driving a nice car, going on exotic vacations and still be empty inside, crippled with fear and dread.

Any time someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ).

A good sermon is going to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. It inspires you. It provokes you. It should make your soul soar.

Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.

Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.

If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus.