February 09, 2007
You Ask Not
When David, my 3 ½ year-old grandson comes to visit we negotiate the menu and he always chooses Spaghettios. Much to the chagrin of his parents, we’ve even had Spaghettios for breakfast. When David gets older he’ll develop new food favorites, but it would be remiss of me to keep serving Spaghettios when he has outgrown them. The writer of Hebrews expressed the need for mature believers to have a diet of solid food. However, as many churches try to attract the seeker group, they continue to serve up the milk of infants. Is it possible that we, as mature believers, are lacking in a diet of solid food because we’ve failed to ask for it…and insist on it?
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Gail;
-----In all honesty, there is a relatively good diet of solid food served at these churches. You just have to either go to the right place to get it or pick out the few tiny morsels stirring around in the milk bowl of the Sunday morning service. Your church leaders explained this long ago as the way to save the lost community of Montrose: give Sunday morning to the unwashed hordes, and serve solid spiritual food in the small groups through the week. The whole system was to work like an efficient spiritual, canning machine and grow the church into four digit attendance overnight.
-----The problem is that people are not tomatoes. Some may not mind being fed down the throat of a spiritual process. But for maturity in the Lord to reach a decent level, man must release control and allow the Holy Spirit to move in His chosen directions. It is more than a bit giggly to think of the Holy Spirit all stuffed up in narrowly defined process of a group of men’s schemed up piece of spiritual machinery.
-----When Paul first tried to go to Ephesus the Spirit stopped him. Then he tried to divert to Bythinia, and the Spirit stopped him again. You did not see Paul pull out a flowchart and show the Holy Spirit the way things work in the church God made him an overseer of. You did not hear Paul explain to the Holy Spirit his chosen direction for the church. Nor did you see Paul pull out his church business card and show the Holy Spirit what it says about his church’s mission statement.
-----Paul instead received in a dream the direction the Holy Spirit had chosen for him to go the next morning. And when Paul had gone through Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea, you did not see him writing a new mission statement on his church business card about evangelizing Macedonia. He went to Macedonia, like the Spirit directed. Then he went to Athens as the Spirit moved. Then he went on as the Spirit kept directing on. Nowhere did he make a spiritual processing machine: put the bad little Jews and Gentiles in here and get the good little Christians out there, all spiffed up and ready for small group processing.
----The Holy Spirit has processing of His own to do on Jesus’ lambs. What that processing requires is a whole lot more than what will fit inside any man’s Christian making machine. What these kinds of efforts demonstrate is that the leaders of the church may be mature in some areas of Christian life, but they have no understanding of the Holy Spirit’s involvement in the fellowship of the body. Indeed, they have tried to take His place in that area, making flowcharts, assembling groups, and defining constraints for the worship service. Think about what they have constrained the Sunday morning services to be. Although many yearn for it, reverence is restricted. Although many are ready for them, the deeper principles of the Word are avoided. And although many are brothers and sisters, the possibility of pleasing each other is limited to only those who like celebration. Anyone who doesn’t can either like it anyway, or go somewhere else. How surely has the clash and clang of their cymbals perfectly harmonized with I Cor 13:1-3.
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