moral

Homesick for God?

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“How many people have you made homesick for God?” (Oswald Chambers, Disciples Indeed)

That’s the key to evangelism, I think. It’s not constantly reminding people how sinful they are or ridiculing their worldview. I think in that approach we forget that we too were once sinful and had wrong beliefs about the universe.

What was it that won you over? What was it that made you want to know and love God? Was it really someone telling you what an awful person you were? Was it someone constantly berating your beliefs?

I think the key is to make people long for God to the point where they’re homesick for God. I think people seeing you loving God and living out of the overflow of God’s love for you will want to know God. People who see you loving others well the way God loved you well will crave that kind of love, even if they don’t have a name for it.

The way the early Church drew people was in how those believers loved each other. They loved lost people as well, but mainly it was in their love for each other that made people want to hear their gospel message.

If all you have is a well-defined set of doctrines and beliefs, no one cares. If all you have is a passion for making people as moral as you are, then no one wants to hear about it. But when you live transformed and let the life of Christ in you permeate everything you do, then people can’t help but see and be drawn to what they don’t have.

The key is to make people homesick for a home they’ve never known but want to go to more than anything or anywhere else. Make them homesick for God.

Not Good but God’s

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“For years, I begged God to help me be good. Didn’t you join up because you wanted to be good? I’d worked years trying to be good and I wasn’t good! Oh, I was gooder than I was when I started out, but I still wasn’t good because as good as I was getting, I still wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t sustain it long enough. Sometimes I’d go 7 or 8 minutes without sinning. But it still wasn’t long enough!

And the Lord spoke to me very clearly that day. He said, ‘The issue isn’t being good, the issue is being God’s. Just come to Me and I’ll provide goodness for you. Just come and love Me. Seek Me with all your heart.’

Now I’m not arguing for sin, but I am saying this: my focus these days is not on trying to be good. I am gooder than I’ve been in the past, but it’s not because I’m focused on trying to be good, it’s because I’ve focused on Him and doing His bidding. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for me and my sinning” (John Wimber).

As I’ve heard before (and maybe you have as well), Jesus didn’t become incarnate to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. See, it’s not about behavior modification and better morals. It’s about being made new.

I still think that more than being gooder, I need to focus on being more like Jesus. That can only happen when the Spirit of Jesus inside me starts to manifest outward from me as I live more surrendered and obediently. It’s no good if I behave better when I still have the illusion of control over my life and my destiny. It’s only when I acknowledge that I belong to another that I really begin to transform.

It’s not about being good as much as it is being God’s.

Still Astonished

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“We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground” (Brennan Manning).

” . . . [A]lmost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to . . . . [O]nly a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement” (from Joe Vs. The Volcano).

Very few things in my life are cause for astonishment anymore. I don’t necessarily consider myself overly cynical, but I have experienced a lot in my lifetime, so not much is new to me.

I miss the part of being a child where so many things astonished me, to when the world was a far more magical and mystical place.

Maybe the one thing that should never lose its wonder for me is the grace of God. The fact that I wake up every morning to a new dose of grace still astonishes me. In fact, the more I see of myself, the more I learn what I am deep down apart from the grace of God, I am amazed that such a thing as grace still exists for me.

Also, perhaps what could serve to draw people to this great God we serve is when people see us living in a constant state of total amazement over God’s love for us. It won’t happen when we focus on following rules and being moral. It will happen when we finally confess our complete and total dependence on God and His grace and fall at His feet in an act of utter surrender.

When you see that life and everything in it is grace, you truly begin to see each new day not as an entitlement or a reward but as a completely undeserved gift (which is what grace is) that comes not to those who’ve earned it but to those who realize that they deserve nothing but death and hell apart from God.

So, thank you, God, for this life, and forgive me if I don’t love it enough. Forgive me if I don’t thank You enough for it and live amazed by it.

Amen.