Saturday, January 28, 2012

Compartmentalization and the Christian Home.


One man well said that “as the home goes, so goes the church.” The reality is seen all around us today. Our churches are filled with a myriad of dysfunctions that can be traced back to the failure of Christian homes to embrace the Biblical mandates of Christ centered, God glorifying leadership, love, simplicity and sacrifice.
Too often we have learned to comfortably compartmentalize our home life, church life and work life successfully while fooling no one but ourselves. During the week in our vocations, we find little difference in our attitudes and actions. At home we live for possessions, entertainment and the idol of retirement. Day after day we teach our children the values of an American culture that has drifted so far from its heritage as to be more recognizable with a hedonistic humanism then with a God centered Christianity. We see little family devotions,  little prayer and little sincere spiritual outreach.
Yet in Church we speak of salvation, sacrifice and service to a God we hardly know and love even less. We convince ourselves that we have pleased the God who created us because we have given Him a couple hours of quasi-attention in church attendance and ministry service. We convince ourselves we have done our part to raise our children spiritually because we have dropped them off at Sunday school or youth group. And so it goes week in and week out as we move from God-mode to home mode to work mode molding ourselves into the environmental requirements of the moment. 
For the truly saved this is a recipe for constant frustration. At the bottom of this compartmentalization there is a terrible lack that haunts us...an emptiness that can never be filled by doubling down on our vocational success, private possessions or ministry involvement. Make no mistake prayer was kicked out of our schools because it was no longer welcome in our homes. God was shunned in our society because He was shunned in our living rooms and bedrooms. Cold churches are the product of cold homes that produce leaders that know little of the God of whom they preach and teach.
Only a radical commitment to Christ which brings every sphere of our lives into a God centered, God manifesting act of worship will relieve our soul agony. Our homes must be dedicated to this principle of living out Christ in the way we communicate, make plans and use our time. Songs of God instead of the world should fill our hearts and homes. Devotions should replace our endless pursuit of mindless pleasure. Prayer should be as natural as eating our necessary food.
From these God saturated home will come God saturated husbands and wives and children that spread this passion to our churches and that influence our secular institutions.
If we are to see any revival poured out upon Gods people in America I am convinced we are going to have to first bring our homes back under the simply worshipful obedience of the Word of God in sincerity and truth.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Knowing the Unknowable.

 
”Canst thou by searching find out God?”
(Job 11:7) 
 
"Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth"
(Hosea 6:3)
 
We live in a reality of dichotomies. Truths that beg us to recognize that God cannot be placed within a box or neatly packaged to serve our own selfish ends and prideful abilities. Ultimately God is and will always remain a mystery to us for we are the work of His hands and by the very nature of our created state we cannot fully grasp the majesty, magnitude and glory of God.
Richard Rolle (1290–1349) in his contemplation of the One true God wrote, ”Verily God is of infinite greatness, more than we can think; ... unknowable by created things; and can never be comprehended by us as He is in Himself. But even here and now, whenever the heart begins to burn with a desire for God, she is made able to receive the uncreated light and, inspired and fulfilled by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, she tastes the joys of heaven. She transcends all visible things and is raised to the sweetness of eternal life...."
God does indeed lay outside our ability to fully comprehend and yet the dichotomy remains that though we cannot know God fully we are commanded to try “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near” (Isaiah 55:6).
In fact this is the very reason we were created (Acts 17:26-28) …to seek and stretch and strain to peer into the unknown vastness which is God and try to comprehend the nature of who He is. God made man for this…to see and to savor His glory and so like the psalmist we (who are true children of God) long and pant after that which alone can satisfy the want of our souls…to know the unknowable and to live all life consumed by the fellowship of a burning heart.
 
 "O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary... My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me."
 (Psalm 63:1,2,8)

Thursday, January 19, 2012

A Heart Ablaze with Gods Glory!

"The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out."
(Leviticus 6:13)
In the Old Testament religious economy the priest was never to allow the fire on the altar to go out. It is a picture of that never ceasing worship which Jehovah requires of His people.

In the tabernacle and later in the temple, we find that the fire upon the altar was continuously to burn and its smoke rise as a sweet smelling savor in the nostrils of God. The priest had to attend the altar regularly or the fire would dim and eventually surrender to a cold ash that would give no light, no heat and cease its God pleasing smoke and savor of worship.

So it is with Gods people today. We are called to attend to the altar of our hearts continually and to never let the worship fire go out. Still most Christians today have grown content to surrender this passion for a lintany of lesser things (Luke 14:16-20) and so we find God people very cold despite the fact they they may be involved in a host of ministries both within and without the church.

The fuel so desperately needed today is that which comes from heart consumned with and constrained by a vision of God high and lifted up (Psalm 63:1-8). When we set our minds eye upon His supremacy, centrality and all sufficency and we linger in that glory we will begin to see the dross of other things melt away. As this coldness retreats will will find ourselves longing for even greater fire and greater love for Christ and before we know it we will enter that fellowship of a burning heart.

The key is time meditating on the wonder and the glory and the Person of God (Isaiah 26:9). We must give ourselves to it if we are to experience this fire burning intensly on the altars of our hearts. Give yourselves to that which you were called to and end your love affair with the world and soon you will feel deep within your soul that fire that brightens and burns for the glory of God.

"Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures."
(Luke 24:32)