Where did God go?

God's not in the box...

“And when the scribes and Pharisees saw Him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to His disciples, ‘How is it that He eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?’  When Jesus heard it, He said to them, ‘those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Matthew 9:11

Jesus was always getting into trouble with the religious people.  He never did things the way they thought He should.  How dare He eat and drink with sinners?!  Didn’t He know that He was supposed to separate Himself from those heathens?  After all, when you are “spiritual,” you must maintain a “holier-than-thou” distance so that their filth doesn’t rub off on you.

In Isaiah 65:5, God tells us what He thinks of these religious people saying, “Who say, ‘Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am holier than you!’  These are a smoke in My nostrils, a fire that burns all the day.”  God says that this kind of attitude brings a stench into His nostrils.  It’s a putrid smell that causes Him to withdraw from us.

Recently, I have been hearing talk among the internet circles about the emergent church.  My perception of this new movement, from what I have read, is that it’s a body of believers that are attempting to take the gospel of Christ to the streets.  They are attempting to let God out of the box, and some people are not very happy about it.  The emergent church sees evangelism as missional living—going to where the people are instead of expecting them to come to us.  Jesus was not too “holy” to go to where sinners were.  He even called Matthew—a tax collector (tax collectors were the most wicked of sinners!) to be one of his disciples!  

Whenever you go against tradition and try to evoke change by doing something new, rest assured you will meet with resistance.  The Pharisee spirit will rise up and object, for “this is not the way that we have always done it!”  Unfortunately, the “spiritual” people of Jesus day were so busy doing their religious thing in the temple, that they missed out on what God was doing because He was out in the street with the hungry people.

God wants His glory and presence to spill out of the church and into the streets.  In my own life, God has moved in ways that went against my traditional way of thinking.  When I got baptized with the Holy Ghost, with the evidence of speaking in tongues, I was in my home.  I thought it would happen at church, but it didn’t.  These past two weeks, the Holy Spirit has fallen on me while I was at home typing at my computer.  Does this mean I don’t need to go to church?  No.  But God is trying to show me that He is moving in new ways.  He is not confined to the church.  He wants to “break out” in our lives—in our homes, at our workplaces, and at the grocery store.  He has given me dreams in the past where I was ministering to people in the grocery store.

Too many times we want to keep God in a pretty little box.  Because when we let Him out, things tend to get a little messy.  We are no longer in control, and this scares us.  When people have an encounter with God, they tend to act a little radical—like David when he danced before the Lord so hard that his clothes started to fall off.  Another one that comes to mind is the woman with the alabaster box who “wastefully” poured out her worship at Jesus feet.  Her worship was messy—she washed His feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. So, in order to maintain “proper” protocol, we tend to reign in the Spirit of God and in so doing, grieve Him.

God wants to break out of the box we have put him in.  If we are not careful, we will miss out on our visitation, and Jesus will walk on by, outside of where we thought he was supposed to be—even as the Pharisees in the temple missed out when their King rode by on a donkey.  He was in town and they didn’t even know it.

“God is getting ready to break out in America, even if He has to bypass her stuffy churches to break out in the barrooms!  We would be wise to remember that He has bypassed the religious elite before to dine with the poor, the profane, and the prostitutes.”
(God Chasers by Tommy Tenney)

It is time that we as a church begin to look for God—to find out where He is and where He is moving.  Somehow, we have missed Him.  We thought we had Him in the box, but when we looked inside, it was empty.  He has broken out and is waiting for us to find Him.