Need more Passion in your life?

That's the sign outside my church right now.
I'm not sure if it makes me laugh or cringe, but there it is.

Tonight we're having an open forum at church to discuss The Passion. The idea is that people outside the church that want a place to vent or discuss the movie can do so. I'm excited for it; but no one knows what to expect. There could be 3 people tonight, or there could be 300. I'm betting on about 20, but we'll see.

Because of tonight's events, I've had to sift through more of the Passion stuff today and I'd like to make a point about it all. Namely this. . . . .We must be daily reminded of our worthlessness apart from God.

That's really what I feel is the crux of the whole matter.
When we forget that apart from God we are meaningless, sinful beings; evil to our very core, we forget what a big deal Christ's sacrifice was.
Last night on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, they were once again discussing The Passion and someone made a comment along the lines of "If God is all powerful, why not just forgive everyone for their sins? Why the death?" (Paraphrased of course)

It was another of those moments where I wish I could jump through the TV and give a response. My reply would simply be; "If God lets any of us into heaven, he's not just." Plain and simple. If you or I or any other human being one day goes to heaven, God cannot be just.
Matt Chandler put it well: (To paraphrase his words)
'Imagine a hardened criminal standing in front of a judge. He's asked if he's sorry for what he's done. "Well, right now I guess I am." He's asked if he'll do it again. He says "Well, I'll try really hard not to." And the judge lets him go free. Any judge doing that in America would wind up in jail himself. Because the sentence is unjust.
In this same way, God doesn't simply forgive sin in the sense that he just chooses to forget about them. The wages of sin is still death, thus death is required for my sin.
Because of all this, we come to know the magnitude of Jesus' death. Payment was required, otherwise God would be unjust and unfair.

When we start to think we are inherently good we begin to forget the necessity of Jesus' death. We start to think he was just a man following his divine calling, instead of a man/God willing to pay whatever it took for you and me. That's why when I see The Passion or think upon the happenings, I'm reminded of what I'm worth to God. To find definition or purpose in anything else is to, in our own sophisticated way, say "Forget you God, I just want your stuff!"(another Matt Chandler paraphrase.) Romans 1.

On a lighter note, we just started using two projectors in our sanctuary, and I'm excited by the way the images we'll be using for worship don't exactly look like a square projected image on the wall. They all have rough edges and look more like 'Virtual Banners" than anything else. I'm copyrighting that term by the way, "VBans" is what we'll call them, and the book will be out soon by Zondervan telling how you too can use VBans in church, otherwise you're not worshiping correctly; and you obviously hate visitors.