Practical Evil: Part One – Overview

Nate changed my life. I was part of a fairly intense men’s group at church for two years. My mentors for the first year were Nate and Chris and they changed my life. Nate said something about four months into our first year that has stuck in my head ever since.

If you guys don’t realize by now that evil is real, you’re missing something.

I suppose I sort of knew that evil was real. But there was something about the way Nate said it that struck me like never before.  Evil is real.  It affects me every day.  It’s in the room I’m sitting in right now.  It’s everywhere.  And in certain ways, it’s winning.

I decided this morning to do a series on the practical ways that evil exists in our lives to shine a light on it.  The number one way that evil succeeds is by tricking us into thinking it’s not real at all.  So we will talk about how that happens and why it is so effective.  We will talk about where evil shows up outside of us, and you might be surprised to see where I think that happens.  We will talk about how evil works its way into each of us and what it does when it gets there.  And in the end we are going to talk about the  warrior who looked evil in the face in the depths of hell itself and kicked its ass so that we can do the same.

We’re not going to get into a whole lot of theory here.  I’m not a theologian or  pastor.  I’ve read the Bible a lot but I’m not a Biblical expert.  I’m going to talk about my experiences with evil because we need to keep this conversation out of the clouds.  If the point of this series is that there is a very practical side to evil that affects us every day, then going intellectual isn’t going to help us.  It would be like explaining the theory of tire design to a guy trying to fix a flat in the rain.  Great thoughts.  But not much help at the moment.

I’m going to need your help in this series.  I’m hoping to draw out your thoughts and ideas through the comments because my experiences here will be very different from others.  And there will be people reading this comments who need to connect with your experiences.  I’m not asking for major level confessions of crazy terrible things you have done in your life.  I am looking for ways that evil has affected you on a day-in day-out basis.  I need your help in shining a light on the way in practical evil works in your life.  I honestly believe that people just don’t see it.  And I honestly believe that talking about it will create “a-ha” moments for others and will change lives.

Let’s take evil out of the realm of the theologians and movie producers and bring it right down here in the trenches where all of us deal with it every day.  We don’t have the luxury of thinking lofty thoughts about evil.  We’ve got to face it head on, see it for what it is, and allow Christ to move through us to walk away from it.  We don’t even need to defeat it.  That’s been done already.

But you can’t walk away from it if you can’t see it.  So let’s shine a light on it.  I’m hoping to see a lot of first time commenters, because we need to hear your thoughts.  If you’ve never commented before, I hope you will consider sharing.  In a hundred people, evil works a hundred different ways.  Let’s pull the curtain back on all of them and get about the business of exposing it, because that’s the first step to carving its roots out of our lives.

 

We were built to be heroes.  It’s about time we started acting like heroes.

 

Photo credit: http://www.alternet.org/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/good_evil.jpg