Wednesday, 20 August 2008

• The Lord roars

   The pastor stared at me across the desk in his luxuriously furnished office. I had spent the last half hour sharing with him the passion that I had for seeing this generation on fire for Christ, and the amazing people working with to spread the gospel of Christ. “God is moving” I said. “We have been praying for revival and I believe we are seeing it among the young people in Christianity. However, it may not look like what we expect.” Without hesitation, he replied - “That's alright – as long as it looks like the church.”

  
  

  I felt as though someone had slapped me in the face. What he was saying to me, quite deliberately, was that he was OK with God moving in this generation - as long as He used acceptable channels. His idea of “the church” is a little white building with a steeple in the middle of the american countryside, where the people gather to sing “Just As I Am” without any idea of personal sacrifice, or maybe mouth “Send The Light” without a modicum of concern for the oppressed, the downtrodden, or those in spiritual darkness. How do I know this? That's what “the church” he pastors looks like. It is primarily an organization, centered around a building, existing for the purpose of perpetuating itself, and increasing the proficiency of it's members at imitating themselves. It is a monolithic “club” which only adds members from other “clubs” from the same political, social, and economic bent. While existing in an area where over half of the population has no connection to any community of faith whatsoever, it is existent only to perpetuate and affirm the disconnect between the community and “the church.”

  
  

  So what is my point?

  “The Lord roars from Zion, and thunders from Jerusalem...The lion has roared – who will not fear? The Sovereign Lord has spoken – who can but prophesy?”

  Those words from the prophet Amos ring as true today as they did the moment they were spoken. God is shouting into our culture, the living God is entering into conversations with humanity, and those who claim the knowledge of Him are piddling with trifles, sleeping in theological enclaves, or drowning their passion in the opiates of politics and power-games in safe arenas. While the world burns, we in the “body of Christ” are no better than Nero with his storied fiddle, playing at being ourselves, obsessed with pointless arguments over “style” and transfixed on things that no one will remember in twenty years. We have beautiful monuments to our excess, we have organizations and doctorates of divinity(gag), economic security and social status, political proficiency and IRA's, yet “the Son of Man has no place to lay his head...”

  
  

  “You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.'
  But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.
  I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich;
  and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness;
  and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
  Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent.
  Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.
  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,
  I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”
  Revelation 3:17-21 (NIV)

  
  Hear me, brothers and sisters – being in relationship with the living God based on the sacrifice of Christ does not mean we have a free ticket to heaven and the license to waste our lives on ourselves and those just like us. If you are not driven to live for others, if you are not impelled by concern for the “outsider”, if you are not overcome by the love of Christ for a lost and broken world, then please do Him a favor and stop using His name in vain by calling yourself “Christian”.

  
  

  Jesus lived to reach out to the “sinners” and the outsiders. Jesus spent more time with tax-collectors and prostitutes than he did in temples. He came “to search out and rescue that which is lost”, in fact his first public announcement of His ministry was this -

  
  

  “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
  because he has anointed me
  to preach good news to the poor.
  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
  and recovery of sight for the blind,
  to release the oppressed,
  to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

  ~Luke 4:18-19~ (NIV)

  His last recorded instruction to his disciples, found in Mark 16 (NIV)-

  "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.”

  If we claim to follow Jesus, then it is time we stopped playing games with God and got serious about living like Christ. It is time for those of us in the Christian community to take a serious look inside our church buildings, inside the communities we are building, and most importantly, inside ourselves.

  At a critical moment in the history of humanity, we must be prepared as Paul the Apostle to count everything as less than worthless, even repulsive in comparison with the value of knowing and walking with Jesus (Philippians 3). When we know and love Christ above everything and anything else in life, we will care about the outsider more than ourselves, we will be more worried about the lost than the saved, we will care more for the world than “the church”, and we will change the world, because we will be like Jesus. May we hear what God is speaking to us, because we need to hear Him knocking on our doors before we go knocking on our neighbor's.

   

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