Dumbing Down the Gospel

As I listened to my Pastor deliver the message last Sunday, I wondered how we, the body, have taken the Gospel of God, in which God has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness, and have managed to make the promises of God of no effect in our lives? This is the same gospel that by its OWN power caused the Holy Spirit to fall on the hearers, as they believed, while Peter was still speaking! (Acts 10:44) And I heard several people talking after the service whose Spirit man recognized TRUTH and LIFE and they physically felt Him grab onto the message. A woman said it’s as if she’s had amnesia, and grace was something she knew once and was now awakening to. One man said he felt like he was having a panic attack on the inside during the message. AMEN! If we weren’t in “civilized” America, I wonder what that reaction would have looked like on the outside!
This week I’ve meditated on “what responsibility as a body do we bear for the lack of power in the church” and the answer is ALL of it. In our effort to make it palatable we coin phrases (I’ve done it, we all have) like “I’m living for Jesus” REALLY? As if we could, on our BEST day, do anything in our own strength and pride to add one iota of Magnificence and Glory to His person. He isn’t asking us to live FOR Him, He says Yield! And I will live through you. Even there, we pat ourselves on the back for “accepting Christ” we tell others, you can “invite Him into your heart” MORE LIKE TRY TO RESIST HIM! I will never forget the Sunday evening service 30 years ago, I experienced His love full force. I had said no to Him for the last time that Sunday morning. When the service started I knew what I was there to do, I could hardly wait for the altar call. I don’t even remember getting to the front of the church, nothing around me mattered, at last I was His. It reminds me of the old movies where the man decides he will kiss the woman and she makes a futile attempt to struggle for a while before she surrenders to what she was hoping for all along.
The ironic thing is, our biggest struggle seems to be remaining humble, “less of me and more of Him”, and we end up making ourselves the focal point even in that. We worry so about Him getting the glory, and if we are in His will. When we see how big He really is, we will see that He is not concerned with our ability to stand in His way. In fact our preoccupation with our “self-centeredness” may be the one thing that makes us most ineffective.
The key is seeing Him. When He unveils Himself in the Gospel, we are beholding the risen Christ; the inexplicable truth of everything that He is overwhelms us. At that moment we begin to understand that He has done it all, and all that is left to do is yield, and we are so disarmed at that juncture that we can do nothing else.
If we truly believe He is IN us, the Spirit of the risen Christ, will we believe for a moment that our simple fleshly shortcomings are an obstacle to Him? He will simply reveal more of Himself, become even more disarming, and in a moment of “controlled ecstasy” we will relinquish what was never a concern to Him anyway. And our plea that we would bring Him glory. Hah, how ludicrous, we cannot! All glory and honor belong to Him; by His very nature he receives all glory. For us to bring Him glory we must stop trying to bring Him glory. We are hidden in Him so He has already taken us out of the equation and He lives through us to glorify Himself because any attempts on our own would only serve to give us cause for boasting. We grovel and attempt to demote ourselves, all the while bringing more attention to ourselves, He waits patiently till our flesh is satisfied that we are sufficiently humbled, and then reminds us that our flesh is no match for Him and can we now proceed? True humility, is boldness, as we recognize that it IS none of me and ALL of Him. We will stop being victims and we will walk in victory when we stop trying to make Him preeminent and recognize that He already is!