Bartering Your Calling for Your Comfort

It’s funny how the goal posts have moved. We judge our faith quality by how God blesses us…as if God is the great cosmic pinata and our prayers are the stick that manipulates the candy out of the sky. Seemingly, gone are the days of conquest, spiritual adventure, raw Spirit-empowered engagement, pioneering, and the raising of Gospel outposts in spiritually barren frontiers.  Perhaps, we traded it away for a little more luxury, a little less trouble, and an absence of pain or resistance all for a predictable, non-circuitous journey.

I can’t imagine that God’s purpose is to save us to polish us up to make us his sanitized trophies to settle us as dust collectors on His heavenly mantle.We read the adventurous story of the Holy Spirit in Acts 1 & 2 and think of the Holy Spirit as our warm, comfy lap blanket to cuddle with on the couch…a Holy Spirit that gives us the “cozies” after punching the clock…some type of spiritual, pick-me-up.  No way!  That’s not how I read it.

The Holy Spirit is our radical empowerment that broke into our reality with an uncontainable fuel meant to cause us to come alive in Him, dead to ourselves, and propelled into a black-and-white world with massive and expressive splashes of vivid color swaths.

The Holy Spirit calls us and enables us to live radically and energized among the world, imparting God’s grace generously to others.  And, in our soft, entitled way of thinking we’re happy to instead settle for a life of fluffed pillows, softish hands, and microwaveable spirituality…but, it doesn’t have to be.