Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Thursday June 24, 2010

Practical advice is hard to come by, but every now and then you discover quintessential wisdom and it can be worth its weight in Gold, which we who attempt to live the life simplified should accept and implement.

The field of service to which I am called is marked by labyrinthine complexity, so much so that if a person does not possess the same educational background most religious speech is Greek to them. Pun intended.

I recall a chapel service in a prison that I attended and I sat with the prisoners and listened to the special speaker. The speaker was a gifted theologian without one ounce of common sense as to his audience. One phrase in his short but seemingly endless speech remains in my old noggin to this day. "The soterial impetus of our evangelical paradigm." The poor prisoner sitting next to me humbly asked, "What on earth do he mean?" ("On earth" is my version). Two people in the chapel understood what the speaker meant. The speaker and yours truly. That we people religious spend too much time impressing one another is well documented. Impress ourselves we do very well, meanwhile the world at large continues its toboggan ride to destruction and hell.

Enter Einstein with this gem:

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Yep, the Albert Einstein. Other's express the same truth with KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. Many are the variations on the last word, but the principle remains the same.

Most books, media programs and especially church programs tend to complicate that which God has presented in simplified form and in the complication we remove the simplicity that makes it possible for the folks Christ came to save to have enough understanding to truly trust Him for "soterial" benefit; i.e. salvation through Christ the Savior (Soter) and the eternal blessings along with Him.


To abandon the simple truth of God is somehow bound into the human heart as witnessed by Paul's word to the wise in 2 Corinthians 11:3:

"But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ."

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2010 Use with credit

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