Christine Caine — Into The World
Because you do what you want from passion. And the problem with us is that we are more passionate for the things of this world than we are about the things of God. Or we do the religious deal well, we just don't do the passion for Christ well.
Or we've taken the emotion, dare I say the spirit out of our faith lest we get too emotive; and yet I'm in love with my husband totally. If he's got my heart he's got me. If Jesus has my heart, he has me.
But if you keep your heart out of your faith and it is just your intellect and it is just a bunch of rules and regulations, you will soon get bored of this whole deal and then you'll sneak out and indulge in a whole lot of other stuff because somehow you've got to satisfy the God-given passion that he's put on the inside of every single one of us.
I wonder -- I wonder who really is lost. Of course, I understand the theology that the lost are lost but let me just explain this; we would all agree that you and I are living epistles; we are God's love letter sent to this lost and broken world. If I sent a letter home to my mother in Australia and the letter gets lost en route do I say, "My mother is lost" or do I say "The letter is lost?" I'm wondering, whether we got lost en route.
Whether we, the church, are the lost love letter to this lost and broken world? We call them lost and of course, scripture refers to the lost as lost because they are lost but I really wonder whether much of us are lost? Because somewhere, every day when God says, "You're my love letter to that workplace, to that school, to that university," wherever your world is, "You're my love letter to them," does the letter actually get delivered?
Do the people at the other end actually even get it? Because so many of us we get lost in our debates about theology, we get lost in our comparisons amongst ourselves. We get lost in our debates about doctrine or tradition or culture or styles and we've heard two beautiful sermons about all of that today;
I'm just tying it all together, but we've got lost. Lost chatting about everything, except for the one thing that we're here supposedly to be consumed with; and we're not lostologists.
And when you no longer understand the lost because you're so busy being lost yourself, you then get into fear so you avoid the very people you are meant to reach because you fear them because you've forgotten who you are and you've forgotten what you're on assignment to do.
Now remember the job of the mission is way too important to leave to the missionaries. See many of us come from Christian traditions where we have a strong missions emphasis.
But we always create departments to excuse the majority of the church from being the church because that's what the missionaries do, it's not what we do. Because I just go to work and I have my nice little house and I've got my nice little comfortable lifestyle and I'm except from doing that.
But I'm going to send an offering to the missionary, God bless them, because that's for the elite troops of the church, that's for the Navy Seals, that's for the big guns, that's for the Billy Grahams, that's for the Peter Pretoriuses, that's for the Chris Caines -- that's for the Navy Seals of the Christian church. The rest of us, we're just normal, and our job is comfort and convenience. We've just got to make sure we protect ourselves.