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We Christians, unfortunately, tend to be more often known for our judgmentalism, criticism, and hypocrisy than our love and forgiveness, despite the fact that our leader, Jesus Himself, told us in John 13:35, "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

I don't know where this article originally appeared, but rather than offer a poor summary of it, I thought I'd post it here in its entirety:

Whose Cookies Are They? by Chip Grange

Taking advantage of an hour layover at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, my friend bought four hot-out-of-the-oven Mrs. Field's cookies. He set the familiar red and white bag on a seat in a non-smoking area together with his coat and carry-on luggage while he went to buy a newspaper.

As he describes it, he returned to find a rather sloppily dressed, long-haired student type sitting temptingly close to his cookies. He sat down on the right with the cookie bag in between them while he opened to the sports page.

When he reached for a cookie, the student smiled at him. My friend had the fleeting thought that he should offer him one. He quickly dismissed it.

But to his shock, without asking permission or even saying a word, the student reached in and also took a cookie. My friend was so overcome with the rudeness and audacity of it all that he couldn't even speak. Instead, he shot a glance at the student that shouted, “Hands off my cookies!”

Confident that the nonverbal communication had its intended effect, my friend went back to the sports page, but this time reached for the third cookie with great territorial deliberateness. Again, the student returned his glare with a smile, and incredibly, without a syllable, reached for the last cookie.

This time my friend delivered a full-faced glare that said, “You are dead meat if you eat my last cookie.” It was only half successful. The student, still without a word, broke the cookie in half, handing the last half to his silent companion in this most memorable afternoon snack.

My friend reported that his stomach was such a roller coaster of disbelief and anger that this last half of a normally mouth-watering delicacy tasted like gravel. He sat there sorting through a jumble of emotions and thoughts, wondering whether to rebuke his uninvited snack-time guest or call the police. But before he could decide, the student responded to a boarding announcement, smiled, and left with a cheery, “Have a good day!”

My friend spent the remainder of his layover stewing and fuming over what the next generation was coming to. Gradually, though, he realized he was allowing the loss of one and a half cookies not only to ruin his appetite and interest in the sports page but also the remainder of his afternoon. He was just trying to see whether he had it in him to forgive the brashness of youth when his boarding call came.

As he grabbed his coat, his body froze. Like an electric shock, the awful reality of what had transpired struck him. For there under his coat – uneaten and untouched – was his bag of four Mrs. Field's cookies.

Suddenly, by an amazing metamorphosis that only a jarring change of perspective can bring, the villain became the hero. That brazen, ill-mannered student transformed into a spiritual giant. What my friend had mistaken for the deceptive smile of the cookie monster, he now recognized as the gracious acceptance of one willing to share even his last cookie with a hostile, thankless stranger.

My friend experienced a new way to ask a very important old question: “Whose cookies are they?” He learned by deep embarrassment that the right answer to this question makes all the difference.

Though I'm a pastor and everything in my life revolves around Jesus, I often tell people that I can't stand religion.

"What???" Is the normal response, "How can you be a pastor who doesn't like religion?"

Let me explain. Jesus never came to set up a new religion; He came to restore our relationship with God. Religions say, "Do this, don't do that, show up here, say these things, and God will be happy with you." Religion is man's attempt to approach God. Christianity, on the other hand, says, "You can't do all the right things, even if you wanted to. You can't be good enough, smart enough, fast enough, brave enough, or holy enough. Your only hope is Jesus." Christianity, as opposed to religion, is not a pathway to God - it's God's pathway to man.

In the Bible you'll find the book of Ezekiel, written by a man named - you guessed it! - Ezekiel. Ezekiel lived during a time when the Jewish people were honestly not all that interested in God. They were proud of their religion, proud that they were God's chosen people, proud that they alone knew the truth, yet their hearts were very far from God - they worshiped idols and the false gods of their pagan neighbors, the powerful trampled on the weak, the rich took advantage of the poor, people delved into witchcraft and esoteric arts, they engaged in rampant sexual immorality, temple prostitution, even human sacrifice... all while being proud of their great faith in the One True God.

See, that's what religion does to you. It gives you this false sense of security. You think, "I'm giving God what's His, so I can have a little of what's mine." You go through the motions, try to do what's expected, look like a good spiritual person, but inside you're dead and full of rottenness.

Religion turns God into a commodity that can be bought and sold. You pay the right price and you get a good pay-off in the end. If you don't have enough religious cash (holiness, prayers, fasting...), you walk away empty.

But God's not a commodity. He's not something you can buy or sell.

So God spoke to Ezekiel, and He made this crazy promise. He said that a day was coming when He would do something entirely new in the world. He told Ezekiel, "I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26)

Religion says, "Take your heart of stone and clean it, polish it, put it on a shelf for people to see." Christianity says, "You've got a heart of stone. What good is that? Get rid of it and let God give you a real heart."

A few weeks ago, I met a young guy I'll call Razvan. When he saw I was a pastor, he became really interested. "Wow, that's awesome!" he told me, "I love God. In fact, I talk so much about God that my friends call me Bible Boy!" He went on to describe how much he loves Jesus and how he just wants to preach the Gospel everywhere, talk to people all over the world.

So we set a day when the two of us would get together and talk with people at the mall about Jesus.  The time came, and I arrived at the mall a little early. Fifteen minutes before our appointment, Razvan called to tell me, "I'm sorry, but I won't make it. It's too cold and I don't think I can go outside today."

So we set a new date, and a couple days later, I found myself at a different mall, this one closer to where Razvan lived. Again, fifteen minutes before our appointment, he called and told me, "I'm really sorry, I can't come today either. My girlfriend is here and we have to talk."

Then he invited me to church with him in two days, as a sort of consolation prize I guess. "Sure," I told him, "I love visiting new churches, so I'd love to join you!"

Two days later, I found myself on the tram at 8 am, on the way to the church. I thought, "I should call Razvan to make sure he's coming." So I did and he answered sleepily, "Oh, hey Jake. What? Church today? Oh, no, I'm not coming today. I was up late last night and I need to sleep today." He went on to tell me how he was up late drinking and dancing at the clubs. Like any good "Bible Boy" would do, right?

"But I want to come with you to your church next time, if that's OK."

"Sure," I told him, and, not surprisingly, he blew me off when I called him before our church service. As before, he had stayed up too late partying.

Our last conversation was about a week ago. He didn't invite me to anything this time, just tried to argue with me about which days of the week were holier and why it was important to worship God weekly and honor the Sabbath and why if you don't you're really in trouble and how it's great to be one of the enlightened ones who knows the truth and will go to Heaven one day.

This is religion. A heart that's no different. A life of criticism, self-righteousness, laziness, selfishness, and immorality, all while putting on an outward appearance of religiosity and spirituality. Parading around as if you love God while your heart is very far from him.

Jesus didn't come to make your heart of stone look a little better. He came to give you a heart of flesh. All you gotta do is give up your heart of stone and stop pretending it was all that great in the first place.

Last time I wrote on the blog, I talked about needing our eyes opened to the reality of who Jesus is. We take him for granted, we look at him like an interesting teacher, a good, moral person, a wise scholar... but we owe everything to him.

And not just us Christians. Whatever faith you are (or aren't), I think the reality is that more of your worldview, more of your life, has been shaped by Jesus and his followers than you realize. No one, in all of history, has been as influential as Jesus.

I'm not a fan of plagiarism, so before going further, I want you to know that most of what I'm about to share comes from the books Who Is This Man? by John Ortberg and The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. I highly recommend those two books if you're interested in learning about the influence Jesus has had through the ages.

Say what you will about Jesus, the life of this one Jew from a small town in Israel has impacted yours. Probably way more than you realize. Streets, cities, and even nations (El Salvador) are named after Jesus and his followers. One-third of the world's population claims to worship him as their God. Children are named Paul, Peter, Mary, Elizabeth, even Jesus... because of the impact of this one man. Dates are set according to his birth. In most of the world, whether we choose to follow Jesus or not, we acknowledge his birth every time we write a check, add an event to our Google Calendar, date a government form, or refer to a historical event. Today is 22 November in the year 2013, 2013 years after Jesus' supposed date of birth.

The life of this one man, who lived in a small town on the edge of the Roman Empire and died almost 2000 years ago, has impacted our lives more than seems appropriate.

The legacy of Pharoah Tutankhamun has vanished. Alexander the Great is barely a shadow. The great caesars of Rome, emperors of China, and tsars of Russia live on only in history books and Hollywood films. Yet the life of this one man, who never conquered a nation, never built an empire, never led an army, persists to this day.

Our whole idea of human dignity can be traced to Jesus. Before him, dignity came from position, strength, power. Greeks competed in the Olympics to highlight the strong and worthy, Pharoah and other kings were said to be the image of God. And then Jesus came along and said that we all bear the image of God, rich or poor, young or old, strong or weak. He said we must become like little children (weak, dependent) if we're to see the Kingdom of God. If you see all people as being worthy, if you've seen value where there is no strength or power, you've been influenced by the thinking of Jesus.

Our idea of compassion on the weak comes from Jesus. Again, Jesus came into a world where it was recommended parents kill their own children if they were born malformed or disfigured or sickly. In philosophy and social thinking, only the strong and powerful were valued. The first orphanages and hospitals were started by Christians, followers of Jesus who saw in their Master a devotion to help the helpless, care for the weak, and heal the sick. If you've ever been to a hospital, you can thank Jesus for that one. Prisons have been reformed from hell-holes without hope to places where even the bad can become good. Why? Because one man, Jesus, told his followers to show compassion on prisoners. Slavery, once a completely normal institution in the time of Jesus, is almost universally condemned (though not wiped out), because one man's followers took it seriously that it's written, "There is neither slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all" (Colossians 3:11).

The concept of equality between the sexes isn't something invented by progressive 1960s feminists but by Jesus himself. The world Jesus entered was grotesquely anti-female. Roman citizens would usually care for their male babies, but if a girl was conceived, more often than not, the baby was either aborted before birth or killed shortly after. Infant girls were "exposed," a nice word that means the babies were left outside to die of starvation or be eaten by wild animals. Archaeologists investigating sewers in ancient Roman cities have found pipes clogged with the bodies of baby girls. If a girl made it into life, she was usually denied education, and her legal status was much closer to that of property than a human. In this world, Jesus came along and allowed women to follow him in ministry, to sit at his feet and learn among his disciples. He entrusted to women the details of his resurrection before he appeared to the men. And so the early church, in Jesus' footsteps, valued and cherished women instead of treating them as inferior like the surrounding society. Equality between men and women? That was Jesus' introduction to your thinking.

The value of education was something Jesus and his followers introduced to the world. Maybe you hate school, so you'd be happier without Jesus' influence here, but for the rest of us, we have Jesus to thank for our educations. Jesus told his followers to "Love the Lord your God with all your mind," and to that end, his disciples have gone all over the world establishing schools, developing written languages, creating alphabets (Cyrillic was invented by a monk), teaching people to read, and encouraging educational advancement. The first universities were all started by Christians, followers of Jesus. The early scientists were mostly Christians who were studying the world to know more of their orderly God - Johannes Kepler, William of Ockham, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Blaise Pascal, Joseph Priestley, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton...

Our idea of humility comes from Jesus. If you've ever cringed at someone boasting in their own greatness, that's Jesus' influence in your worldview. Before Jesus, philosophers and social thinkers viewed humility as weakness. Men like Aristotle and Plutarch taught their disciples how to do great things and effectively boast in them. Roman literature is filled with the self-exalting writings of men who thought they deserved praise but could find no other voice to praise themselves but their own. Then Jesus came on the scene and said things like, "Blessed are the meek" and "If you want to be great, become like a servant." His early followers went on to say similar things, Paul telling his churches, "Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position." Why did Paul have to write that? Because it was so contrary to the normal thinking of his day. And ours, really.

The whole idea of forgiveness comes from Jesus. In the ancient world, forgiveness was weakness. To forgive an enemy would be a sign that he defeated you. Yet Jesus came along and said, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Scholars have suggested that Jesus was really, truly, the first thinker / philosopher to put forgiveness in a positive light. Before him, it just wasn't an idea in the world.

Our ideas of hypocrisy, our hatred for it, the sick feeling we get when we see someone acting hypocritical all come from Jesus. Before Jesus, a hypocrite was simply a Greek term for an actor. Then Jesus came around and talked more about hypocrisy than anyone else. He literally re-invented the term, creating in it the negative associations it carries today. He was the first person to condemn hypocrisy, acting one way for some people and another way for others - before him, it wasn't a bad thing, just something you had to do to get by in life. Scholar Eva Kittay noted, "It is clear from the literary records that it was Jesus alone who brought this term hypocrisy and the corresponding character into the moral record of the Western world." If you can't stand when people are acting like hypocrites (even Jesus' own followers!) that's a mark of His influence in your thinking. Without his thinking on hypocrisy, you wouldn't care about it. You'd call it wisdom, just like everyone else before Jesus called it.

Most of our ideas of sex and marriage come from Jesus. It's funny to me that people call Christianity's ideas of marriage without divorce and sexual purity "traditional" and "old-fashioned." The reality is that these ideas were new things to the Western world when Jesus introduced them. In the ancient world, marriage was flexible. Men had multiple wives, concubines, and mistresses. It was considered normal for men to visit prostitutes and commit adultery, as long as it wasn't with a married woman. Homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and sex with children wasn't just accepted but in many ways held up as the ideal. The emperor Comodus had over 200 young boys and girls kept as sex slaves, doctors prescribed orgasms to children to help with certain sicknesses. Even the gods of ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome lived lives of sexual promiscuity and misconduct. If you've ever felt disgusted by pornography, if something inside you cringes at the thought of adults having sex with children, if it seems somehow wrong to engage in sex with animals, that's Jesus' influence in your life. If you want your marriage to last for life, if you've dreamed of that perfect man romantically sweeping you off your feet in devoted love, if you've watched Pride and Prejudice and found yourself wanting a romance like that of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy... you have Jesus to thank for showing you a better way of sex and marriage.

Say what you will about him, the fact remains that Jesus has shaped everything in our world today for the better, often in spite of the foolishness and stubbornness of those of us who call him our leader.

Jesus is the reason you think the way you do. He's the reason our world looks the way it does. Say what you will about him, his influence is undeniable.

My name is Jake and I'm the pastor of Biserica Piatra Vie in Bucharest, Romania. We're a new church and very small right now, but we hope to bring the light and love of Jesus to this city as best as we can.

I meet a lot of people every week, and usually concepts of religion and spirituality come up in one form or another. Most people in Romania (and America) know the name of Jesus, they've been to a church service, they can tell you the story of how Jesus was born in Bethlehem and died on a cross and rose again.  They'll tell you stories of how he healed the sick, how he walked on water, how he understood the Father better than most.

Our heads are filled with lots of information about Jesus, but we don't really know Him and we're not really letting His life change ours.

I forgot where the quote originates from, but someone once said, "We're way too familiar with a God we barely know."

At the end of chapter four in the book of Mark, there's a story of Jesus calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee. Of course, you already knew that, because we all know all sorts of facts about Jesus, right?

Anyway, Jesus is in the boat with his disciples when a big rainstorm appears. The rainstorm turns into a thunderstorm that's so fierce that Jesus' disciples, fishermen who make their living on the sea and aren't scared by little rainstorms, start to freak out.

They look for Jesus, only to find him sleeping, completely unaware of the storm. You can't blame him. Jesus just got done with a full day of ministry, it was late, and he was tired. So he took a nap while he trusted his disciples to get him where he needed to go.

So the disciples, scared and a little offended that Jesus doesn't seem to be concerned, wake him up and yell, "Don't you care that we're going to die!?" So he wakes up, takes a look at the fierce storm, and simply commands it to stop. And here's the crazy thing - it actually stops.

After this, no doubt Jesus went back to sleep, but the disciples, the account records, are terrified even more than before. The story tells us they're "filled with great fear" and begin to ask each other, "Who is this man?"

"What just happened? Did you see that? Who is this guy? What kind of power does this guy have? What kind of person is this? Who does this sort of thing? I thought we were just hanging out with a really godly carpenter who loved God and knew the Scriptures really well... but this is, this is something different..."

Earlier, when the wind and waves start rising up, the Bible records that the disciples are afraid. The word Mark uses is a word that's only ever used negatively in the Bible. It's a word that means the disciples were weak, wimpy, cowardly, frightened like little girls seeing a big spider (I have 3 little girls, so I can say this). It's like Mark is telling us, "The storm was so bad that everyone was acting like wusses, scared out of their minds and whining like babies."

But at the end of the story, after they see Jesus calm the storm, the word Mark uses for fear is an entirely different Greek word. It's usually used in the positive sense, like having a fear of God. It's a word that means the disciples were so filled with terror that they'd rather run away if they could. It means intense and fearful awe, terrifying reverence like we'd feel if God himself stepped into the room and we saw him in all his glory.

Suddenly, it's like the disciples' eyes were opened and they realized that something more powerful and more terrifying than a storm at sea was in the boat with them.

"Who is this man? I thought he was just a carpenter, a really good rabbi, probably a prophet... but this? Who is this man?"

I think we all need our eyes opened like the disciples. Instead of being terrified by the wind and waves around us, instead of treating Jesus like a character in a child's bedtime story, instead of getting annoyed that he doesn't seem to be helping you, I think we need to let him open our eyes, bringing us to the place where we look around and ask each other, "Who is this man? I thought he was just a religious figure, I thought he was just someone grandma talked about, but this... what is this? Who is this man?"

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Mark 4:35-41
35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” 36 And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. 37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. 38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” 39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. 40 He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” 41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?