What is radical in your life this morning?

I'm not absolutely certain that Eugene Peterson's The Message does David's Psalms better than David does, but here's the 95th of those Psalms ... "Come, let's shout praises to God, raise the roof for the Rock who saved us! Let's march into his presence singing praises, lifting the rafters with our hymns! And why? Because God is the best; High King over all the gods."

Uh, wow. Doesn't that say it all? I mean, all?

You get up in the morning, God is waiting.
You go to bed at night, God is there.

He is the Rock who saved us!

Read the lead of this story from the Religion News Service and look around you and count your blessings this fine morn.

"Basima al-Safar retouches a picture of Jesus on an easel outside her house overlooking the flat Nineveh plains, 30 miles north of Mosul (in Iraq).

"The murals she paints tell the story of her people, Christians in Iraq. But with Islamic State militants nearby, she is worried that life in Alqosh and towns like it will soon come to an end.

"The Assyrian Christian town of around 6,000 people sits on a hill below the seventh-century Rabban Hormizd Monastery, temporarily closed because of the security situation. Residents of Alqosh fled this summer ahead of Islamic State militants. Around 70 percent of the town's residents have since returned. Still, a sense of unease hangs in the air."

And therein lies the difference this morning between wherever you read this and Iraq and other places like Iraq.

Does a sense of unease hang in your air simply because of who you are, Christian? Do you sense a bit of unease because, simply because, you have made the dramatic and wonderful decision to follow a Palestinian carpenter named Jesus?

Seriously, is there anything in your life this morning that is radical, dangerous, interestingly sacrificial?

The answer for you -- and for me -- is quite probably not.

We go around talking about sacrifice while we live in the very lap of luxury. Meanwhile, the Psalm I read this morning from one of my dozens of Bibles speaks to me of a time when there was something for the Rock to deliver us from on this earth. In this country today, that's simply not the case unless one calls inconvenience something we need to be delivered from.

In countries like Iraq, there is a real and substantial possibility of death resulting from saying, loving, the name of Jesus.

And we have the unmitigated gall to talk about persecution.

Let's march into his presence singing praises, lifting the rafters with our hymns! And why? Because God is the best; High King over all the gods."