We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.

Many in the modern world fell for the myth that we're living in a static, fixed, flat reality of just material things.

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.

In one of the accounts of Jesus's death we read that the curtain in the temple of God-the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God's presence-ripped.One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.A beautiful idea.But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.

It's absolutely crucial that we come face to face with the power of our choices.

When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage. So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.