It's not how you start, but how you finish. When Christians start, the glory of the Lord shines like the sun on a clear, cloudless day. Shine, Jesus, Shine, we sing, arms raised toward the heavens, an unspeakable joy filling out hearts and our minds. Can't wait to get there. Can't wait to sing praises. Can't wait. Period.
But then, time passes inevitably, slowly, crawling like the ticker messages underneath ESPN's programing.
Listen and imagine the early church: "Many miracles and wonders were being done through the apostles, and everyone will filled with awe. All the believers continued together in close fellowship and shared their belongings with one another. They would sell their property and possessions, and distribute the money among all, according to what each one needed. Day after day they met as a group in the Temple, and they had their meals together in their homes, eating with glad and humble hearts, praising God and enjoying the good will of all the people. And every day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved."
Imagine, just imagine, completing what you do for a living and heading to the (church) for a group meeting on a daily basis, then breaking into smaller groups and eating meals together. This is your life. You do this without question, bringing your children into the midst of other believers. Aweeeeeesomeeeeeeeee.
Imagine, just imagine professions of faith on a daily basis. Imagine growth of the church, daily.Oh, how awesome it would, could be.
But of all those words in all those sentences the fraction of a phrase that intrigues me most is this one: "and everyone was filled with awe." That's the way, certainly, I felt at the beginning. Didn't you? Wasn't your early walk flat out awesome? I remember loving to simply worship, loving to forge a path through the unknown of scripture, loving the search for those joy moments with the Lord daily. I really mean that. Daily there was something new and exciting and, well, awesome.
God was, as Rich Mullins told us back then, an awesome God. Even Rich died, though, and those moments became much more mundane, didn't they?
Today, though, I ask myself this: Is my daily walk still filled with awesome?
In the judgment of Jesus on the seven churches in Revelation, perhaps the most severe is what he says about Ephesus, one of the early churches. Jesus said, "But this is what I have against you; you do not love me now as you did at first. Think how far you have fallen."
Jesus fed 5,000 men at one point, which probably means he fed closer to 8,000 counting women and children. They were filled with awe as well as fish and loaves.
When he screamed to the heavens, "it is finished," there were about five persons at the foot of the cross. Where did the awesome feeling go for the other 7,000 plus? I can see the persons walking away from him that last week. "SHHhhhhhh," the parents said late in the week to the children who wanted to play with Jesus, after he rode that blamed donkey into the city at the beginning of the week.
Now, there's merit to growing in Christ, to get beyond the awe-filled days perhaps. I once had a person say to me that on a scale of 1-10, you want to live your days as fives. In other words, not too high or too low. I get that. I also get that most early Christians want to keep that feeling of awesome going. The problem is it's not how you start, but how you finish. It's always going to be a walk, a ride, a journey. Eventually, if effort to keep feeling awesome supplants simply living God's awesomeness then what we're left with is work instead of awesome relationship. And we fail and fall.
When Jesus took Peter, James and John to the mountain top (an awesome experience if there ever was), Peter wanted to build tents (housing) for those he saw. He wanted to stay there. Peter, who had walked with Jesus, seen miracle after miracle, wanted to keep that awesome feeling forever.
That's how it starts. Some build their whole religious experience around that "awesome" feeling, that mountaintop experience. But it's how you finish, not start, that is vital. Are we finishing spiritually with a love of God through his Son Jesus as described by His Spirit that speaks clear tones of awesomeness? Are we still loving the way we were? Are we still allowing Him to love us in the same manner as we did at the beginning?
The truth is awesomeness of God on the mountaintop is fleeing. Sooner or later, you must leave the mountaintop and go into the valley. Still, when that mountaintop experience, that awesomeness feeling, begins to wane, we are giving an incredible opportunity to open our souls to allow Christ to come in and stay. That being said, I ask again, is your daily walk, up and down though it is, filled with awe? Are we awed by the suffering moments? Are we in awe of the blessings that come not nearly as regularly as those challenges? Are we awed that an all-powerful God would have anything to do with a sinful persons such as we are?
Did you start with an incredible, words-can't-describe-kind of worship, prayer-life, spiritual walk? Has that walk been filled with potholes lately? Are you, for lack of a better word, bored with your relationship with Jesus, with the church, with the body of Christ, with the volunteering efforts of your church, of your friends, or of your family? It's okay to talk about it here. It's almost a secret there are so few persons reading this and less than that responding. Besides, God already knows.
It the awe gone, leaving just the some?
What do we do?
Here's the magic rub on the side of the genie-filled bottle. What we do is surrender, relax, allow God to be God in our lives. Open your self to a new way of thinking, living, being.
The simple answer is that we find the glory of God all around us. Everywhere we turn, we can see the glory of God — if our eyes and our hearts are open to God’s presence. The thing is, as we live out the days of our lives, most of us are never going to see a shining figure, or hear a voice from the clouds. However, I also think that most of us, if not all of us, have, at one time or another, experienced something unusual. That something unusual, even after a years-long, long spiritual walk, is what we call awesome. Still, Just as awesome at the end as it was at the beginning. It's the consistency of the walk that is truly, truly awesome.
In the midst of your day-to-day grind, suddenly the future became clear, suddenly you could see God’s will for your life. During the middle of a busy workday, you suddenly felt a need for prayer, an overwhelming urge to commune with God. In the midst of one of life’s struggles, when times were hard and the future looked dark, the meaning of the Gospel and the nature of God came shining through, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
Awesome. It's still awesome. It's a perfect fried egg after eating fried eggs for decades. It's a sunset as warm and inviting as a Hallmark Card. It's rainbows and it's rainstorms. It's the look you give your spouse after 25-plus years and it's the same look you gave him or her when you were first married. It's love, and it's awesome. Same with the look you give an unseen God when you reach something in the Gospels that seems to be new and previously unknown.
We need to be careful not to fall asleep on our way up the mountain. If we become satisfied with the way things are, falling asleep is very easy to do. I don’t know about you, but it’s after a big meal, when I’m really satisfied, that I’m most likely to fall asleep.
In our churches, sometimes we become too satisfied. Maybe we’ve got a good crowd coming; if we had any more, we might have to start thinking about adding on to our building, and Lord knows how expensive that would be. We feel good about our worship services, our prayer life is fine — everything’s going good. We’re satisfied, and that’s when we get into trouble.
Christ didn’t call us to be satisfied. If I remember correctly, something was said about taking up our cross, and following Christ. I once heard that “God comforts us in our afflictions, and afflicts us in our comforts.” There is nothing more dangerous to the kingdom of God than a comfortable church or a comfortable Christian, reveling in the same ole, same ole, rejecting even the effort to find the awesomeness in life again. We have to be careful not to become satisfied with where we are. We have to continue to follow Christ, all the way up the mountain, back down the mountain, into the valley, out onto the plain, near the river, onto the lake.
All of the walk with Jesus should be seen as potentially an awesome moment. Then when awesome breaks out, we simply revel in it instead of being shocked.
That's awesome, isn't it?
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