Jesus is like a salt-lick
I'd kind of forgotten about this analogy, but Chris reminded me of it this morning. If you have a bunch of cows in a field on the edge of a highway, you probably need a fence to keep the cows from wandering into traffic and getting hit. But if there is a really amazing salt-lick in the middle of the field, the cows will never want to wander away and then the fence is basically unnecessary. The cows still need to stay out the street. If they go in it and get hit by cars, they'll still die. But they won't have the desire to wander off anymore, and so the fence is unnecessary.
It's a similar thing with God. When we have walls up seperating us from God, we need rules to keep us from hurting ourselves. What do people generally search for? Love, happiness, acceptance... and so we search for that. Everywhere, if we don't have boundries saying "this would hurt you! not make you happy" or look to the right place. When we focus on Jesus - who loved us SOO much as to come to earth and die for us and accepts as whoever we really are (God made us, didn't he? So why wouldn't he want us to be our true selves???) then we don't need fences. It's not that their purpose is mute - it is just completely fulfilled by the coming of Jesus and the personal connection we can now have with God. So Jesus is like a salt-lick.
It's a similar thing with God. When we have walls up seperating us from God, we need rules to keep us from hurting ourselves. What do people generally search for? Love, happiness, acceptance... and so we search for that. Everywhere, if we don't have boundries saying "this would hurt you! not make you happy" or look to the right place. When we focus on Jesus - who loved us SOO much as to come to earth and die for us and accepts as whoever we really are (God made us, didn't he? So why wouldn't he want us to be our true selves???) then we don't need fences. It's not that their purpose is mute - it is just completely fulfilled by the coming of Jesus and the personal connection we can now have with God. So Jesus is like a salt-lick.