From the post When Being “Saved” Isn’t Enough by Shawn Smucker. The whole article is worth a read.

“Save yourself!” It seemed the common cry of everyone taunting the man being executed: passers-by, those who caused his conviction, his executioners, even his fellow criminals. “Save yourself!”

But he didn’t. He didn’t save himself, because he knew the part he played in the redemption.

If you follow this man, have you taken the bait – have you “saved yourself,” and then congratulated yourself on a choice well made, a new life found for yourself?

Or are you participating in the redemption? Are you seeking out what your part might be in redeeming the world?

Michael Horton blogs about Harold Camping being a false prophet because the predictions that he’s made haven’t come to pass. But in this paragraph he gets sloppy with his pronouns and makes it sound as though Jesus is the false prophet because his predictions failed to come to pass. “What??” some will say, but then others will reply that Jesus predicted he’d return within a generation of his ascension.

Of course, Jesus may return tomorrow, or the next day, or long after we die. We simply do not know. However, we can be sure that the errors that he teaches—quite apart from his failed predictions—are enough to regard him, tragically, as a false prophet.

From the post Rachel Held Evans | The Great Disappointment

I confess that beneath my playful derision lies a hint of fear, not that I’ll be “left behind” but that I’m already caught up—in a delusion, in false hope, in a God of my own making…and perhaps, in a looming Great Disappointment.  

Like it or not, Harold Camping and his followers make us laugh because we see a small piece of our faith in theirs. They are exaggerated caricatures of ourselves. 

We too are guilty of projecting onto God our expectations and desires. 

We too can get overconfident in our interpretations of the Bible. 

We too expect God to judge the way we think he should judge, act when we think he should act, be who we think he should be. 

And, you gotta admit,  there’s a chance that we too might be absolutely, devastatingly, irrecoverably wrong.

From the post My Understanding of Christianity at Exploring Our Matrix comes a quote about trying to get both our Christian doctrine and practice right:

… I suspect that it may be more Christian to actually follow in practice a Jesus we do not completely understand, than to get as close as possible to understanding a Jesus we don’t really follow.