Early in my married life I was under the mistaken impression that God had it in for me to be a pastor. I love church (little c) and all that comes with it – the people, the ideas, and oh yeah – God. I go to church to meet God – not to say that I can’t meet Him elsewhere; He is everywhere after all. At church, He comes to us in a special way. The scriptures say that ‘where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.’ (Matt. 18:20, NKJV) He promises, without question, His literal presence whenever we gather together as believers in His name. That is what makes church special – and makes Church (big C) decidedly un-special; but that’s another topic for another time.
Considering the fact of God’s literal presence in our midst, one would think we would experience church differently. After all, the very creator of all things is there with us – shouldn’t we sing louder, or dance better, or experience more miracles or something? It could be argued that a worship experience that lacks vitality is evidence for the fact that a church is not actually meeting in Jesus’ name. After all, His presence in our lives is transforming – isn’t it? Churches (little c) I have attended sometimes begin to work to leverage that idea when they find their Sunday mornings coming into a slump – their people seem bored. They begin to expend much effort making the ‘big show’ on Sunday something to remember and to insure a positive experience for their congregants. They justify this by saying ‘this is the way the big boys do it down the block; the churches out there with 10,000 – 15,000 members – in those churches its all about lights and music and video and drama and, and, and,’…Jesus? Not so much.
My point is really very simple, but is hard to accept for those of us whose lives have gone through a transformation because we know where we have been – and it didn’t look pretty. We know that what Jesus’ offers is better than anything we ever had and we expect our lives to feel different – its difficult because when we start living our lives after we know Jesus, all of those ‘nice’ feelings go away and reality sets in. Life is, after all, life. Our mistake is in refusing to accept that reality; we sometimes start faking it to try to get those ‘nice’ feelings back. The staggering thing about this is that the reality I am asserting we refuse to accept is truly a completely new reality – we are new beings; reborn as children of God. Nothing in our past lives compares to what Jesus has opened up for us. Its just that it doesn’t feel that way – and that feeling (or lack thereof) creates all kinds of goofiness in the name of Jesus.
I can already hear the nay-sayers response, and several of them are from the Word of Faith movement. ‘If you speak it, the tongue has the power of life and death and you are speaking death to yourself – Mr. Yonko. Your life SHOULD feel different – you are a Kingdom Kid now – put on your crown and start behaving like you are saved!’ Nonsense. Speaking the truth of the reality you see is the first step to understanding the True Reality – and the True Reality I love in today hasn’t put any crown on my head. The biggest downfall of folks that hold on to that verse from Proverbs (18:21) is their eminent inability to see the forest for the trees. The forest is beautiful, but it is full of trees that have nasty pokey needles on them. The ‘good’ of that forest is that we are strangers here. The world, created by God, was originally beautiful and still has glimpses in it of God’s beauty – but it has been and continues to be corrupted in equal parts by both man and Satan and his minions. Our home is in a different land, and trying to assert that the life we have today is anything similar to what our life will be when He returns cheapens that new life that is coming.
Perhaps I am being too harsh on those that hold to the truth of Proverbs 18:21 – we can, after all, build people up and tear them down with the words we speak. The problem is, if you gnash your teeth and tell lies to someone whose ears are only attuned to the truth of God’s word, all of the ‘death’ in your tongue will come to naught. Case in point is Stephen – first martyr after Jesus death; he never believed the lies the Jewish council he was brought in front of told about him – he held on to the True Reality to his death (Acts 7:54). That was good – it most decidedly was not ‘nice’, and it certainly didn’t feel good. In the end, the words of his tongue brought him death, even though they were truth. No – in the True Reality, Stephen was brought to the real life – and Jesus was there waiting for him.
You see, we put way too much focus on today – we try to make ourselves have all those ‘nice’ feelings we seemingly lost, and not step on each other’s toes and we make our churches feel good so that tons of people come to them…and in the end, we lose all that is truly ‘good’. Jesus is most certainly there in the midst of us, and His presence is truly transforming – but when we speak those words do they fit into our definition of ‘nice’ and what ‘reality’ is? Or do we hear Jesus and allow the transformation to complete its work, even in our perceptions, and speak those words knowing the true definitions that come from the True Reality? This life is a glimpse, a wisp, a puff of smoke – we have only so much time to do what Jesus has called us to do on this earth and all the effort we put into being ‘nice’ keeps us from being ‘good’.
Read the scripture. There aren’t very many ‘nice’ people immortalized in that text. They weren’t all ‘good’ either, according to our definition of the word, but I believe that if we listen to Jesus and accept the True Reality our worship will be vital, and it won’t change one bit. Our lives will be made holy – and we will simply be doing what seems natural. Our compassion will deepen because our focus is on Him, and not on us. We must begin to accept that Jesus is truly sovereign and that following Him sometimes just feels normal – and that is good.
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