Breaking An Old Mindset

In the gospel of Luke 5:37-39 And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. 38 But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. 39 No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better” Today we use phrases like this to say the same thing “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” or “If it’s not broke don’t fix it”.  More or less “leave well enough alone”.

I was in church yesterday trying to meditate on the message I was about to share. As worship was taking place I stood in the back and looked around the building. I saw many hands raised, the sound system was projecting well, attendance was down but with school systems on fall break I knew many people were out of town.  The worship team was singing and exhorting. On the outside everything looked well enough. We were having church! Yesterday looked much like last Sunday and the Sunday before and the Sunday before that, wait a minute, it looked like the Sunday last year and the year before that.

In my spirit, I felt Holy Spirit was not active at all. It just felt like we were going through the motions. Now I don’t say that to discriminate against the people who came or wrongly judged what they were expressing or receiving.  After all, most are simply drinking the wine they’ve been served and being the wineskin they’ve been told to be. No, I don’t have anything negative to say about the people coming but I could say a lot about those of us who set the structure and definitions for Christianity. People’s spirituality is built upon the teachings and examples of others. So if we don’t like the spirituality we see in people, we may need to refer to the teaching, hence discovering the root to the problem. I say problem because Houston we have one.

I got up into the pulpit, gave an announcement or two and asked people to stand for the reading of the text. As we finished, I stepped to the side of the podium to say a prayer and could only utter the words “Lord awaken us” before falling silent. Silence sat over the church, in this setting it can be somewhat deafening. It only lasted a few minutes but it seemed like a very long time. In my mind I was feeling the need to move on; after all we’re taught to not have silent places in the service. It needs to move!

Finally feeling a release, we just began to bare our soul. Confessing the place we find ourselves as Christians seems so far removed from the description given in the scriptures. Erwin McManus in his book the Unstoppable Force says that when we take a previously defined word and use it to describe something else other than what the original definition intended, then we redefine the word and consequently it loses it power. I think this has happened.

Christianity is about putting your hands to the kingdom plow and not looking back. It is about losing your life for His sake, to gain the one He has for you. It’s about preferring others more than ourselves. It’s about living the scriptures, loving your enemies. IT’S ABOUT DYING WITH A CROSS ON YOUR BACK AS YOU FOLLOW HIM WHILE YOU EXPERIENCE HIS GRACE AND MERCY AND EXPOSE HIS LOVE AND POWER.

I realized many things yesterday- one in which I blurted out without reservation “I hate my Christianity”. I didn’t say Christianity, so don’t fall out with me, I said “my Christianity”. Because mine would be an embarrassment to many of our predecessors and I know it. They wanted to die but chose to live in order to share Christ. I want to live to enjoy my life not because I need another day to tell someone about Christ. They didn’t concern themselves with the adornments of life but were driven by the depravity they saw in man and the love they saw in Christ. I am motivated, well one only has to look at what gets our attention and effort each day to find that out.

How do you say to a people “we need to own instead of rent”, when they feel like they already own? How do we call people to living the real Christian life when they feel like they already do? I can say without reservation I don’t have all the answers but I can also say we need one.

May we all be willing to change our minds through an honest evaluation of what is being accomplished through our efforts, becoming new wineskins, skins that have elasticity. Allowing God to offer a new wine to transform us into the Christians He originally intended us to be. Lives are at stake and eternity will judge our present time. There is something more to this!

-Anthony Daley

GOD IS!

I’ve noticed that as time goes by, the more comfortable I get with God. A casual relationship has been building through what I perceive Him to be. This relationship construction carries with it an expectation within me, both of what I can receive from Him and what He desires of me. The problem, I’m now realizing from this approach, is my definition which inspires expectation has been limiting. Consequently, my life is impacted in some negative ways due to this narrow perspective of God.

When the writers of scripture make an attempt; even through the Holy Spirit, to give us a description of God, they rely on what they know to draw a comparison for you and I to understand. They will use words such as: He’s like, likened unto, and like as. I now realize they are not fully describing God but searching for words to describe what they have no words for.

We have reduced God to manageable terms.  A.W. Tozer said, “When we try and imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that which is not God as the raw materials for our minds to work on… We need the feeling of security of knowing what God Is like, and what He is like is of course a composite of all the religious pictures we have seen, all the best people we have know or heard about and all the sublime ideas we have entertained.”

Today, most people’s pictures of God or Jesus is drawn from the Left Behind books, Passion of Christ movies, pictures on grandma’s walls, sermons we’ve heard, testimonies that attributed some action to God. I want to challenge you to not allow any of them to define God, but merely use them to help push you on a continual search for Him. Allow Him to define Himself to you.

It’s pretty arrogant to think we can describe Him. God IS more than our words can describe.

In Isaiah 6:3, “And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” The emphatic and unexplainable cry of the seraphim’s as to the King of Glory- is simply Holy, Holy, Holy!

In Hebrew the word for Holy is Qadosh (kaw·doshe)-  meaning different, separate, distinct! Think of it this way- there, they are hiding their faces from God as they shout one to another- He’s different, He’s separate, He’s distinct. In other words, they are saying there are no words to describe Him.  God is more than our words and is not confined by our perspective. God’s holiness means His complete “apartness” from anything that is sinful. He is different from that which is common; He is separate from that which is defiling.

Don’t allow yourself to become familiar with a God that is far more than any definition can ascribe. There is much to Him, do not trade a narrow perspective for the beauty of the multifaceted God that He is. Never let your life become satisfied in what you know- stay driven by what you have yet to explore and expose in Him. God’s direction to you today will always lead you to a greater discovery of who He is. 

-Anthony