Gospel and Risk

I have been doing a lot of thinking and rethinking about what the Gospel is. In fact this would have to be my biggest shift theologically over the years. I used to think it was only about going to heaven after you die, but now I believe it is also about what Jesus talks about in Luke (freeing the oppressed, giving sight to the blind, proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor, building the Kingdom of God here and now, etc..) As I was thinking about this and about one of my last posts I took a book off my shelf (Exiles by Michael Frost) and came upon this long quote that I absolutely love and resonate with. Hopefully someone else will as well:

"Likewise, I want to hear a spoken word in the assembly that expresses danger, energy, possibility, and opening for newness. So much of our preaching is so overly concerned with the technical questions of getting the truth right that preachers have squeezed all the life out of the gospel. We have thought of the gospel as a fragile and precious object and have held it too tightly, rendering it shapeless and uninteresting. Much of what passes for gospel speech these days is not dramatic or artistic. It is bound by the reason of technique and overly concerned with concreteness. It seems stilted and mechanical. We believers hear it presented to us week in and week out, and by virtue of the very fact that we are believers, we put up with it. It is a truth greatly reduced, and it calls forth from us a faith greatly reduced also. Our struggle in the twenty first century will be the struggle to maintain our commitment to the teachings of Jesus and the revelation of the gospel in the New Testament while endeavoring to discover a robust, poetic faith that abandons certitude and inanity"

What a quote...
Lord don't let me have a greatly reduced faith...needs to be my prayer.