Why God isn't boring

Well they showed you a statue, told you to pray!
They built you a temple and locked you away...
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done.....

-Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young

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The world looks on the Christian faith as boring. Now, we don't combat "boring" with "hip", though that's certainly a step in the right direction of being culturally relevant. We combat "boring" with Christ. If your church has lost its appeal to the world, consider that maybe we've lost the cross as the center of what we do. 

I just felt like tonight that I ought to make a point, and it relates to the song I quoted. The worst thing we could do is make Christianity a "Looney Tunes" religion, complete with angels and clouds we can sit on, and lots of mahogany harps. I don't know ANYONE who would wanna live anywhere like that. God did not incarnate himself, Christ, in human flesh to come and die so that we would think of him as a distant, boring God! I'm tired of bored faith, I'm tired of not bringing people into my church, I'm tired of being dominated by my routine and my wallet! I don't want to be another cheap American Christian! Our faith here in the States is pretty shoddy. If you think you know persecution, just drop yourself off in another country and talk to me in a month. Let me know how you feel. We don't have to deal with jack-diddly crap. 

I'm not saying I have all the answers. I just know that if I were Satan, I would try to make God (and everything that gives you strength as a Christian) to seem some sort of very distant, ethereal idea that you kinda go "yeahhhh...." about in your head but you never really connect, you never really understand, you never really *click* and become convicted of how your life needs to change! Just go ahead and take the VITAL things of God like his salvation, spiritual aid in the form of angels, and the Holy Spirit (which, need I remind you, is literally the King of the Universe inside you), and we take those things and we make them vague, glossy, pretty, Hallmark-card material that never is PRACTICAL and REAL enough for those things to come through for us. You let our friend die, our mom get hit by a drunk driver, and see if that kind of flowery, distant faith comes through for you. I guarantee you you're going to blame God, or worse, you'll keep quoting sentimental cliches like "Think happy thoughts" without having any REAL support or relationship, AKA, Christ. It's not a relationship if you holla at your boy only when life hates you. And so we put John 3:16 and our flowery Christian propaganda on our coffee cups without understanding that as sinners, we have blood on our hands but there is real, concrete help here for us. Don't fall in this trap. 

Ok. So as material beings trying to understand an inmaterial God, that problem is naturally going to happen. But there are things we can do so that we aren't singing about "feeling the brush of angel's wings" on Sunday, and yet Monday night, our distant view of a boring Heaven with harps (who plays THOSE?) isn't stopping us from having sex with our girlfriend.

1) God is not a robot. He has feelings, he wants a relationship with you (in other words, he's not just a homeboy you can tell off and he won't care). He burns for your loyalty. PRAY that unlike the sinners in Romans 1:26, he won't abandon you to your ignorance, but that he will continue to beat wisdom into your head until you care enough to spend time with him. Pray that the "passive wrath" of God won't befall you. More on this to come later.

2) The Pentecostals got at least one thing right: the Holy Spirit is worth listening to and communicating with. As Christians we are linked by blood and spirit to Christ, and his Father's very Spirit lives inside of us (if our hearts really have changed to love Jesus more than ourselves at all, that is). If this isn't amazing to you, you've clearly blown a fuse. So call me crazy, but if a God beyond Creation's comprehension gave me... um... HIMSELF to live inside me, that's worth going more nuts over than a bunch of mere people playing a football game. I have no idea where our passion is, that we can get so flustered over stuff like sports, and yet just feel reluctant to "get into it" when worshipping God when we all know he's real. I think about the times that I've felt distracted and disengaged in church, seeing later on that day as I'm yelling at a football game on my TV that my interest isn't really so much with God as I thought.

3) Prayer is your way of proving to God you care. He already knows what you're gonna pray... pray anyway. The only point in a sovereign God asking you to pray is that it proves you actually care to spend your time on him. He's not up there going "Sorry can you repeat that? I had 15 thousand angels trying to tell me stuff all at once and I didn't catch that." You can dare to believe in God's power. He is beyond anything we even know.

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I am in seminary now. I have to labor and sweat to "want" to spend time with God in a relationship context instead of a textbook context. What is wrong with my heart?! Don't I know how much I need God? Don't I remember how depressed I was on October 29, 2007 when I was saved, and how terrified I was of the loneliness I felt? 

We all need God to come through for us. We're all messed up. Any sinner like you or me can see that. Just please, I beg of you, fight to remember the intimacy of God. Remember that he's right here and he wants you.