The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity by Matthew Kelly

Author:Matthew Kelly [Kelly, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

IT’S BEEN DONE BEFORE

The hardest things to do are those that have never been done before. If something has been done before, in most cases you have access to a wealth of knowledge about the best way to approach the task at hand. You can learn from someone else’s mistakes and benefit from their trial and error. It is much harder to do something that has never been done before because you have no guide, no research, no map, and no expert to show you the way or point you in the right direction.

In the corporate world we talk about this idea with phrases like “hunger for best practices” and “commitment to continuous improvement.” These are not modern business concepts. Christians have been practicing these concepts for almost two thousand years.

Take as an example a twenty-first-century biblical scholar. She doesn’t start from scratch, with a blank sheet of paper and a Bible. Modern biblical scholars stand on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before them. They begin by studying the discoveries of the great biblical scholars in history.

In its most basic form, think of it this way: Biblical scholar A studied the Word of God for fifty years and was widely considered the most influential biblical scholar of his time. Biblical scholar B was born thirty years before biblical scholar A died, and she began studying the Bible at an intellectual level the year A died. Is biblical scholar B going to start from the very beginning, where A started fifty years ago? I sure hope not. I hope she stands on the shoulders of A and all the best biblical scholars from the past, learns all she can about what he learned as quickly as possible, so that she can advance the Christian community even further in its collective understanding of the genius of God’s Word.

That is hunger for best practices and commitment to continuous improvement, and Christians were practicing these concepts hundreds of years before they were ever mentioned in the context of business.

Do we have challenges before us? Yes, huge challenges. Are they original challenges that have never been overcome before? No. The first Christians, our ancient ancestors, dealt with very similar situations, but the scenarios they faced were even worse than those we face today. The first Christians were giants in this sense, and we are going to stand on their shoulders to learn from them by igniting our hunger for best practices and our commitment to continuous improvement. What they learned will allow us to respond to the challenges that face Christianity and society today better than ever before.

It’s been done before, and that, my friends, is another thing of beauty, because by transforming their culture and changing the world, the early Christians left us a blueprint. We are going to use that blueprint to do it again.

Now, I hear someone saying, “But the culture is so much more powerful today, so the task before us is infinitely more difficult than it was for the first Christians.

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