Yes. Enter me and conceive in me a whole new, true life. Wouldn't that be great to pray that every morning? We do pauses several times a day, oftentimes together. One of the things that I've been more camping on the last number of months is that God and I would become one in the same way that Jesus prayed. He said, "I pray that they will be one with me as I am with you, Father." When I was younger I would just kind of read over that and just kind of dismiss it as an insurmountable mountain that I couldn't climb. Yet when you think of, did Jesus ever have a prayer that was never answered? Did Jesus ever pray a prayer that was amiss or out of the will of God? Not at all. So here is his prayer, I pray that they will one with me as I am with you, Father. The prayer of Jesus is that you and I would be at one with him.

I asked myself this question, why does the cross of Jesus have such an impact on so many people around the world today? Why does it have such an impact? I believe it's because the cross carries a power that goes beyond theory. It carries a power that goes beyond speculation. It carries a power that at times goes beyond our ability to even understand it. It carries a power like that. I remember a few years ago, I was talking to a very elderly gentleman who had really nothing to do with church since the time he was a young boy. He got turned off to church and he didn't have anything to do with church for probably 80 years of his life.

Yet, he went one day to a museum in Paris, and he told me this story. He was looking at a series of paintings that had to do with the crucifixion and the sufferings of Christ, and then a picture of the open sepulcher with Jesus coming out of this tomb. He said to me, "When I looked at those paintings, I said to myself, I could serve a God like that. I could serve a God like that."

Sometimes I have a hard time with that. I don't know about you, but there are some things I find much easier to pray for than others. To pray for a political leader who I don't agree with and find myself really in consternation over, that's a sticky wicket for me at times, but the word of God is true, isn't it? It commands all of us to do that. This revolution, the first visible sign of this revolution was the resurrection, and there were going to be more signs to follow as well in this revolution. So the early Christian writers began to incorporate what I call very stunning expressions of that crucifixion. Can you imagine with me for a moment to think of an execution of someone, whether it's by electric chair or hanging, lethal injection. Can you imagine describing that as delightful?

This man said, “My name is Legion”. There are a lot things that are implied even in that name. That name really means that his life was very splintered. We've even had recent studies in the last, maybe 50, 60, 70 years in the realm of psychology, where the study of like split personalities have been researched. There is a lot of controversy over this, but people who have been dramatically abused early on in their lives at times create safety mechanisms on how to cope with life. They do this of course, because they don't understand the life that Jesus can give us.

There is no question that God desires transformation, I would say without a doubt that God is not happy with a lot of behavior in the world today, obviously, but when we focus on the behavior, rather than the hearts, then what we begin to do is we have this external coercion that isn't really how God really desires to do things.

But it says here to not only act justly, but we are to what? Love mercy. We are to love mercy. We are to give ourselves to mercy. I find in my experience that it's much easier to give myself to judgment than it is to give myself to mercy. Maybe it's because I love judgment more than I love mercy in my heart. But God is saying, I'm showing you, oh mortal... That's all of mankind, human beings, men and women, boys and girls. I've shown you, oh mortal, what is good. This isn't the first time he talked about it. He said I've shown you what is good and what do I require of you?

Here is the mindset that we've had in the church that this sin needs to be conquered. We need to come against it. And so we've exerted this power-over approach. We label the behavior with sin with a capital S and if we say it loud enough, or with enough shame or enough leverage, or we hold a big enough sword in a sense over people, well, then that will get the sheep to get in line and start behaving properly. We do it with tithing and we do it with all sorts of things, don't we? But what really happens when this approach is taken

I'm going to take your knee out. Your mother must be ugly. Look at your mug, all sorts of stuff like that. What good did our prayers do in the locker room? Jim knows what I'm talking about, don't you Jim, right? All I'm saying is this; that kind of Christianity is a veneer Christianity. It's just a veneer. You know what we do? We take a lot of time to Polish up that veneer. If we don't see past the veneer, we will begin to think that the veneer is really the truth that we should be seeking.