Un-organized Religion
History is littered with those attempting to harness God, to leash His omni-presence, and build boundaries around His boundless person. This "God is my co-pilot" mentality seeks to put the driven divinity in the passenger seat of man's bandwagon. We fence in the Almighty six days a week, until on Sunday we turn our religious levers and ask our God-in-a-box to pop out and perform for us. Like a master puppeteer with hands of hype we pull man's heart strings, but our theatrics leave us tangled, and our knock-off leaves us in knots. I've come to realize that the problem with the man behind the curtain....is at the end of the day it's only a man behind the curtain. Our smoke and mirrors only serve to leave us coughing and confused. We have replaced the righteous lit city on a hill, with fog machines, projector scenes, and laser shows; because we have to. We have to take everyones attention off the fact that God is not in our sanctuaries. We don't want to admit that our hearts resemble more the dry-ice in our props, then the all consuming fire of Jesus' presence. It all boils down to control...we want it...God has it, but faking it is cheaper then paying the price to experience it.
Rules, regulations, and liturgy bring shallow comfort in there predictability. It's much easier to write a bulletin around man-made ministry, then God breathed spontaneity. Don't get me wrong I'm not against having a plan....I plan to fall on my face and tarry in the upper room of intimacy with the Most High till His Spirit baptizes me in power to turn this world upside down. This type of fanatic mentality creates real issues though, it makes it difficult to beat the "lunch rush" to the local all you can eat fare. I weep over the appetites that truly get our praise, when were willing to watch and wait for our table buzzer to go off longer then on our knees in reverence to Him.
Religion is neat, and simple. It offers structure, and solace. It allows for wiggle room from the rigid requirement of organic obedience, replacing pursuing His presence with perfecting our processes. If practice made perfect, then our redundant repetition would have brought righteousness, but instead it brought bondage. We learned how to make faith a formula, and in doing so we have cured ourselves of the undistinguished disease of desperation. We have made for ourselves broken cisterns unable to hold water, we are clouds without rain, advertising what we do not have the ability to offer. Churches have taken out bank loans, and exhausted themselves with telethon like building plans in painstaking effort to achieve the fulfillment of scripture, we have worked hard to gain a form of godliness, but I fear we are working even harder to deny the power thereof.
God is calling us to un-organized religion. To wild worship, and unchained companionship with Him. It's a fact that God moves when we move out of the way. We only have to over-compensate in our services because we have under-estimated Him in our service. When our agendas and itineraries fall to His will and tempo; our pyro-technics will not compare to the brilliance of the glory He will pour our upon us. He is offering His liberty and living words in exchange for our piety and dead works. His redemption in exchange for our regulations, and His glorious intimacy traded for our legalistic liturgy. We can continue to speak only about what He has done, or we can be a part of what He is doing. We can only learn about miracles long past, or learn first hand of the miracles he longs to pass through us. We can only worship He who was....or we can gaze upon and worship who He is, and in doing so experience the worship of Him that is to come.
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