I’ll admit I had fun unleashing my imagination in writing about a present day conversation with a character from the bible. However, I’m very new at this blog-thing and I’m not sure what the rules are regarding length, so I felt that to continue would make the story rather lengthy. Besides, I am at a crossroad and must consider whether I want to walk in the footsteps of Jesus as he invites me to “follow him”, or walk in the footsteps of the rich young ruler who, although excited about what he saw and heard from Jesus, was unwilling when it came down to decision-time, to give up the things of this world in order to follow. He wanted what the Lord spoke of…it stirred him, it touched a place of emptiness within him…but not at the expense of the trinkets this world offered. He was unwilling to pay that price.
I’m on this exercise kick right now thanks to my friend Dave encouraging me to get a Fitbit. The numbers just weren’t adding up the other night on my step count so I had to make a choice to come up short on my daily goal, or get bundled up and go walking. I chose walking so took off out the front door.
As I walked the neighborhood, I heard my side of a conversation with the Lord. If you were a third person listening in you’d a thought I was ready to give up everything to follow Him. However, upon further review, the things I was so eager to give up in this conversation were things convenient to give up. I’m weary in my job and long for the Lord to open doors for me to walk away…I’m tired of working with people in the legal system who have such little insight about why they are where they are, and lack desire to make the changes necessary in how they think and how they live…wait! Are we talking about me or my probationers? I find that there is often a very fine line between being on my side of the desk and being on the other side in my office.
I’m reading the writings of some old school men of God from the 20th Century…Leonard Ravenhill and Francis Schaeffer. Their message back in the 1950’s through the 1970’s is very strong against the direction the evangelical church was taking even back then. I’ve found myself drawn toward returning to the places where, as believers, we may have gotten off course.
I’m questioning the message of the present day church. Where has secular humanism seeped into our pulpits…our seminaries…where has a little yeast entered into the batch and gotten mixed in to the current product? Where have we become guilty of dressing up a message that brought both riot and revival in the New Testament, and sanitize it so its palatable for the world to digest? Where has worship shifted from exalting the Holy One to promoting our music ministries on stage? When did we stop being Kingdom focused, hungry to be used by the Savior to snatch people out of the grasp of hell, and instead became preoccupied with spacious, comfortable buildings, schools, cafe’s and libraries in all-purpose churches that minimized the need to be soiled by a world racing toward judgment? I wonder…will we weep when we stand before the Lord and compare the life we built for ourselves verses the life the Lord offered to us?
Please don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not interested in signing up today for a daily dose of persecution for my faith…but I do have to question why I don’t see it. Jesus told me the servant is not greater than the master…the student not greater than the teacher…He told me that what they did to him they will do to me…I hear of people dying for the faith in other parts of the world, but not here in America. Are we so enlightened that the bible is no longer relevant here in western culture? Have we been lulled into a dangerous lukewarm place of complete ineffectiveness and irrelevance that we are simply an annoyance to an unbelieving culture?
In Galatians 1:6-7, the Apostle Paul challenges the early church by stating, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – which is really no gospel at all.” I also think about Paul’s words in 1Corinthians 2:4 where he talks about how his message and his preaching “were not with wise and persuasive words but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.” I’m not in every church, and I certainly don’t know what’s going on in your church…but I suspect that our message and our preaching have been with wise and persuasive words because we are seriously lacking a demonstration of the Spirit’s power…but that’s okay as long as we’re entertained and we leave happy…right?
Our communities are hungry and they are thirsty…but they are not standing at the doorstep of the Church. It seems to me that as I said earlier, we have become irrelevant…the messengers have tweaked a powerful and relevant message to make it more comfortable to deliver so we avoid creating discomfort with a coming judgment. I want revival….but not at the expense of riot…
Have we created a gospel to fit our lifestyle as opposed to create a lifestyle that fits the Gospel?
What do I know…I’m just a guy standing at a crossroad trying to decide which way I want to go. I’m not a preacher, I’m not a man who has a strong grasp on the bible, I’m just a guy who looks around and has determined in my mind that things are not adding up.