“There will never be a church where every meeting is thrilling, but there could be a church where Christians gather with the anticipation that the Spirit could invade their hearts at any moment, and think that maybe He is, without their realizing it.”    From Real Church by Larry Crabb

Great quote, but when will we define the church as people; all day, every day, in or out of a meeting?  Let’s all expect the Lord to be at work in our lives every minute of every hour whether we are conscious of it or not.  He is!

There is an instant, if only that brief, where we don’t care about ourselves.  We are lost in, engulfed in, the love of God revealed to us through the death of Jesus.  Since He died for us and made it be about us, we realize we can forget about ourselves.  Unfortunately, the moment passes.  We revert to pre-salvation, self-centered thinking, which gets married to and supported by incorrect Christian teaching.  We begin to believe that since He made it be about us, we should also.  Our liberty, freedom from self-awareness, is now gone.  We begin the slide to practical atheism that leaves us no different in outlook than the world.  If that is not tragic enough, we convince ourselves that the slide is actually maturity in Christ.

Have you ever gotten off track, made a wrong turn or something of the like, and didn’t notice it until much later?  Do you remember the sick feeling you got when you realized how far wrong you were?  Way off course and so much time and distance wasted.  There is regret mixed with acceptance that sitting there stewing doesn’t get you closer to your destination.  You figure out where you are, make the needed corrections and get back on your journey, sadder but hopefully wiser and more vigilant.

We are reading the book of Isaiah together as a church.  Actually we read through the Bible each year following a rotating plan.  My Sunday messages come from the passage we read in the preceding week.  So we are reading the heavy hitter of the Major Prophets; and it is full of reminders, reminders that we are not where we ought to be.

You cannot read the Old Testament without being aware that a relationship with God has moral requirements. Isaiah and all the prophets dealt with the moral failure of the Israelites (among others) and not only called them to live uprightly, but warned them of judgment if they continued in disobedience.

Too many people today don’t even think about what the Bible says about the way they live every day.  They are insensitive to the leading of the Lord and ignorant of His word.  In a church I used to attend, we sang a rousing chorus about the army of the Lord.  This song had uplifting music with a fast tempo, and everyone loved to sing of the triumph of the Lord.  No one, not even the song leader, thought about the passage from Joel that we were singing.  The army of the Lord was locusts sent to destroy the land (Israel), strip its crops and bring famine.  The words were about judgment; but because the music was exciting, we enjoyed the song and sang stupidly along about tragedy and death.

The prophet reminds us that we are here in our world, our culture, as standard bearers of God’s righteousness.  The church (believers in Christ) is to counter the laziness in the land, the untruthfulness, the pleasure seeking and self-indulgence.  The church is to be self-sacrificing and bearing the burdens of others, not selfishly requiring others to fulfill our obligations.  Even many of our well-known preachers talk more about getting from God than what God has already given us.  We have entrenched in our thinking a spiritualized materialism which leads us to believe that everything revolves around us.

Maybe it is time to pull over and look at the map.