A Message for the Consumerist Christian

As I am sitting here, I am trying to write a song. It's not going so hot. I have these deep thoughts of God and I'm having a hard time explaining them in poetry so I'm trying my hand at prose.

I had a conversation with my dad last night about my sermon topic this week which is how a consumerist society has affected our attitudes towards worship. In the middle of discussing this with my dad, I feel like my eyes were opened. It's not just worship that we treat with a "I want that and I want it this way" consumerist mindset... It's how we view our entire faith!

If you look at Christianity when it first started, you would find a bunch of people sold out for Christ. We're talking people being burned alive, decapitated, crucified upside down and living in constant fear. Or at least we would be afraid. One of the more graphic stories about martyrdom is that the Romans would force feed giant apples to Christians and then put them in the Coliseum with completely starved dogs and the dogs would rip open their stomachs to get to the apples. But in the midst of all this happening, Christ was still being preached and guess what? It was growing! Exponentially! So in light of that it makes me wonder, what is the difference between then and now? Was it that Christ's life was only a generation or so away and now its been almost two thousand years? I hardly think so. Those people were still living in faith, not seeing Christ alive like us. I really narrowed it down to one major theme. They weren't living for themselves.

I think about my walk with Christ. A lot of it has to do with the regularity of my devotions, my involvement with church, and maybe attending a few prayer meetings. If I can do those things and somehow avoid sinning in my personal struggles, I feel like I am growing. I know people who are obsessed with spending hours with God in prayer and worship. There is a whole group of thousands of people just a thirty minute drive away who are worshiping all day, everyday. So I'm asking myself, what's so wrong with all that Micah? Well... nothing really. It's all great and I can give scripture to support how important those things are. The church seems to be preoccupied with the presence of God and we judge the successfulness of a church service on if it had the "it" factor. Did God show up? Did I feel Him in the room? Was I touched by Him? Again, what's so wrong with wanting God to show up? We need Him more than anything so how come I shouldn't want to be in His presence? Well here's where we go wrong, and I'll tell a few stories to get to the point.

I'm sure we are all familiar with Acts 2. A gathering of believers in the upper room and the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit fell. But what we miss, or at least I do when I read this, is that the believers didn't say, "Oh my! The Spirit is here! Lets pray for each other and soak this up! Let's just stay in this moment and savor it!" What happened? They left the room and poured into the streets! Peter, the man who had coward when asked if he was one of Jesus' friends now stands on a street corner in the middle of the biggest celebrations in Jewish culture and proclaims God's power and the resurrection of Jesus! One more story...

In the following chapter, Peter and John are just walking around town. You know, just like we would do if we were wanting to get somewhere near our house (come to think of it we probably would just drive). So they are just walking around and they come across a lame beggar. Not lame like uncool, lame as in his legs were deformed and he couldn't walk without assistance from a healthy friend or relative. He asks Peter and John exactly what he asks everyone, for money. The Holy Spirit falls on Peter and he instructs the beggar to get up and walk and low and behold, the man who was deformed just moments ago, stands up and starts dancing! God is awesome!

So back to us. We cry out for the Spirits outpouring and yearn for his presence. But when you look at the Bible, God pours out His spirit so that we can MINISTER, not hoard it for ourselves. We have become so "us" focused in everything we do. There are many, many more examples of how God poured Himself out and almost all of them have to do with giving someone the ability to minister and witness.

If we truly want to overcome our sin and struggles, if we really want to see lives changed, if we really want God's power to be revealed in this earth, we have to witness. It's the only way. God didn't come so that we can experience Him and hoard his life-changing power to ourselves. Say someone went through medical school and became Joe Schmoe Ph.D. At the end of his long life of being a doctor a man stands to evaluate his life. "Joe, being a doctor you took your knowledge and kept yourself healthy and sickness free your entire life. Good job." Somehow I think that misses the mark. Doctors are doctors to make the sick, well and the injured, healthy again. In that same way, we have life-giving knowledge why must we keep it inside our walls?

My challenge to all of us is to recognize in what ways are we self-serving in our faith? How can we change that? What are we going to do today to impact those who don't know?