identitySPECIALIST

Our NSO (New Student Orientation) theme is Against the Grain.  It was great sharing about it today.  But I took an against the grain perspective on the Against the Grain theme.

Being against the grain is a Jesus quality.  It was something that Jesus did.  He did many against the grain things.

I then asked what they thought about when they think of the phrase against the grain.  The first answer that a student gave was that we needed to go against the world.  It’s such a Christian answer right – to go against the world.

I came back to the idea that it was a Jesus quality, and while the Scriptures say that the world will hate you if you’re a Christian, there’s a ton of places that talk about how we need to love the world.  God so loved the world.  We are commissioned to go into the world. We need to be in the world, but not of the world.

I expected them to say that we needed to go against the world.  I expected them to have all of these ways that we can go against the world, but they weren’t expecting to hear about how much God loved the world and that Jesus called them to go into it.  When you put those ideas together – it’s not possible to go against the world.

Inherent in the phrase – against the grain – is to be against something, but the other side of the coin is to ask – what are you for?

When we talked about this being a Jesus quality, we talked about the idea that Jesus was about the will of the Father.  Jesus did these ‘against the grain things’ not to be against those things, but because he was about the will of His Father.  There’s a difference between going against the grain to do it for the sake of going against the grain, but there is be so about the will of the Father that the stuff that you do just goes against the grain.  The focus is the will of the Father-not going against.  From this perspective – it’s not about going against it, but being for Jesus.

It goes against the grain of the phrase ‘against the grain.’