Do you mean it?

Yesterday on the way to work, I was listening to a sermon podcast for the first time in a while.  In all of the business of moving and shifting work hours I’ve gotten a bit disconnected from God.  Not rebellious or angry or any of that, just distant.  That never really works out very well, even if it seems benign.

I can’t even tell you what the sermon was about, but my desire for God immediately went from a 2 to a 10.  I paused the podcast and started crying out to God.  I asked him to pursue me where I failed in pursuing him.  I told him that I need him… more than anything!  And some of it seemed a little contrived coming out of my mouth, as if I was listening to myself.  But my heart was there.  I even had to tell God, ” hey this feels kind of fake and overboard when I haven’t been around much lately, but it’s real.”  A phone call interrupted, but the reach out was there.  God was off of the porch and on his way to me.  My dog does that too, but just because I feed him.  God is genuinely interested in the request.

O God, you are my God;
I earnestly search for you.
My soul thirsts for you;
my whole body longs for you (Psalm 63)

And so I went on.  Not ignoring God, but yet reengaging the world around me.  A coworker and I stopped for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant we frequent, and that’s when God asked the question.

“Do you mean it?”

I was blindsided in conversation by a former self proclaimed Buddhist Monk-now prophet who spreads his own blended message of what ever floats his boat?  He began to tell me that God actually has three sons, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, and that each had been given 33 and 1/3 of the whole truth.  They were also the sons of Moses and were the characters represented as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  That you combine all of these religions to make the truth.  That the holy spirit tells him these things.  That Jesus was not the true messiah, but that Enoch will be coming back as the true messiah.  It was crazy, but we entered a real discussion.

And the incredible thing is that I really kept my cool.  I kept trapping him in his words, making him contradict himself, but I explained to him that I was telling him these things in love.  I was very direct with him that he was being mislead and told lies by Satan.  He valued Jesus at some level, but denied him as savior.  I painted him into a box where he must call Jesus a liar or a lunatic, if he would not call him savior, but he would not do it.  The spirit of the whole thing was calm.  He loved being heard without contradiction, but once confronted with truth, could not defend his position.  With God’s spirit in me, defending God was easy.

God said, “Do you mean it?” and then gave me the tools to stand up.  All of this in front of a coworker who knows I follow Christ, but has never heard anything at this level from me.  I was truly not ashamed, bold, confident.  God was really moving.  “Do you mean it?”

It is so easy to follow God when I rest in him, so easy to be lead.  It is so hard when I don’t.