What's in a name?

The name 'The Upside Down Secret' probably deserves a bit of explaining.

The upside down secret is:

A. A secret; so I can't tell you too much about it.

B. The idea that when we search for things in life we often find out that they are quite backwards from what we first thought, or on a vertical axis, upside down.

C. A picture of the Kingdom of God, already here but not yet realized. More to come on this in later posts.

Think about Jesus' discussion with his disciples in Mark 9:33-37 about whom is the greatest. All the disciples are trying to figure this one out; they truly want to be great in Jesus' eyes and they just want to figure out how to go about doing that. But how does Jesus respond? He says,

"If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." Mark 9:35

This is one of my favorite examples of Jesus flipping the script. Think about things upside down he says, and you might start to understand. One of my favorite tweed wearing pastors puts it like this:

"Jesus recognizes in his disciples' quest for greatness a good thing that has become ugly and distorted by sin. And instead of destroying the whole distorted thing, he describes a pathway on which the distorted and ugly pursuit of greatness will be radically transformed into something beautiful. So Jesus doesn't condemn the quest for greatness. He radically transforms it. Go ahead and pursue it, he says. But the path is down, not up."



I'm starting to love the blog world already. More to come about Nicaragua, the theological basis for Piper wearing clothes from Savers and Driscoll staying trendy, and other things secret and upside down.