Am I Any Different? February 13, 2011



This Sunday the children were recognized for
their hard work in Sunday School

Pastor Mike at Iglesia del Camino has been preaching on the truth: “God loves you just the way you are, and refuses to leave you as He found you.” Today, his question, asked within the first 30 seconds of his teaching was, “How are you different when you leave this place [the church] then when you walked in here today?” Yeah, he doesn’t tend to mince words.

I think it’s worth sharing and reflecting on some of his points from today. Have I made worship a predictable experience? I know many Sundays (more than I like to admit) I struggle for just “15 minutes more” in bed. How quickly I have become accustomed to sleeping in on Sunday. (At Westside I’d be at church before 8.) Though worship here isn’t until 10:30, it’s so easy to just want to lie at home doing nothing. I want to make Sunday MY day instead of HIS day.

I need to stop and say, none of this has anything to do with the quality of worship or the teaching at Caminos. I have yet to worship there where I have not had a powerful sense of the Holy Spirit falling on us. It has more to do, I think, with the fact that the “old man” in me has not fully surrendered to the “new creation” I’ve become in Christ. For a long time, I just thought I was lazy. I’m realizing that anytime we go to meet God we will face opposition—for the world, from our enemy, but even from ourselves. Not our redeemed hearts, but the old man that wants to pull us back into the slime Jesus saved us from. As I reflect on today’s teaching, I realized that much of what is going on here is a battle in the spiritual arena. It’s so much easier to flight when you have identified the real enemy.

So how am I different? Am I more like Christ when I leave worship than I was when I came in? How? If not, why not?

Pastor Mike raised the question, “Do you live your life with anticipation for what God is going to do next?” And I sat rather complacently, thinking of the experiences I’d had the week before in Santa Rosa. Find a child who “just happened” to come to the home we were visiting who desperately needed to be in the malnutrition project. How it “just so happened” that we stopped at a used clothing store where I found exactly the shoes I had been wanting. I felt pretty good about my ability to recognize the hand of God working.

After church we went to lunch with Daryl and Wanda Fulp and their 9 kids. Then we headed over to Hermano Pedro, where we visited Valentina (the little girl from Santa Rosa who had just been admitted) and and Jordan (who had come into malnutrition weeks ago. Neither Dick nor I thought he would make it, and now is chubby and active). I spent a good deal of time with Jessica, fighting with her to keep her into a sitting position. (Literally, fighting. I was dripping sweat when we were done.) And I left the unit praising God for what He had done and again, feeling pretty confident in my ability to see the hand of God at work in all these situations.

After Hermano Pedro, I went back to Chimaltenango with Dick and the boys. I would be staying the night at a hotel there, so I could go with Chris Mooney to pick up the two friends from Westside in Omaha, who were coming on a “vision trip” to prepare for a family mission trip from the church in October, 2011. As I was praying for the guys who were coming, I prayed that this trip would be a life changing experience for them.

Suddenly it hit me. What was I expecting God to do in MY life because I was on this trip? I realized that these trips into the field were becoming somewhat routine for me. . .I knew what I thought would happen on a trip, and it usually did. Once in a while God would shake me up by making His hand so obviously present that I couldn’t miss it. But how many other “God-incidents” did I miss because they were not dramatic? How many times did I ignore God’s attempt to change ME through what I was experiencing, because I didn’t expect to be changed. After all. . .this is what I do all the time. Why would I expect to be changed by my daily routine.

I think, though, that this is exactly the way God usually works on changing us to be more like Christ. Not in big dramatic acts, but in the simple experiences of daily life. After all, Paul says “day by day” we are being transformed into the image of Christ. How often have I interfered with this transformation because I was indifferent to what God was doing in me?

I went back to my sermon notes to look again at Mike’s advice about being changed by worship. He said, “What you look for you will find. What you pursue will reveal itself to you.”

The same advice, I believe, will help us be changed by our daily life. Each day come before the Father:

• Hungry for what He wants to do
• Willing to be changed by Him through our experiences
• Expectant that He will change us, each day, to be more like Jesus.

I resolve to remind myself of this as I start each morning. I will come before Him with a hunger, a willingness, and an expectation that He is at work in my life. I can’t wait to see how this will impact my walk with Him.