The God of Your Convenience
Imagine for a moment, you’re living your life, doing good works, being a ‘good’ person, that no one has a bad word to say about you, you’re going to church every Sunday, loving worship music, paying tithe, giving to charity, when you have trouble you pray and ask God to help you. You don’t do the whole star sign thing, to your knowledge you never worshiped any other God, you live to the ripe old age of 99, you get to the good old pearly gates, cry out “Lord, Lord” and are met with a loud and resounding, NO ACCESS!
This is a huge fear, I believe for 90% of ‘Christiandom’, that for all the clapping of hands, singing, shouting and praying in tongues, you may be met with a “I never knew you!”
'“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.”
Matthew 7:21
This scripture has been sending shivers down my spine recently, as a pastor, the weight of responsibility is heavy. We spend so much time thinking about churching the unchurched, or reaching the lost, what about churching the churched. Because there are many who do all that seems right in the eyes of religion, but have no knowledge of God for themselves, and sadly ignorance will be no excuse when the time comes.
When the Israelites, waited on the bottom of Mount Sinai for Moses to come down, they got impatient and turned to Aaron, to give them an avenue by which to worship God and so in the end they build a golden calf, out of all their gold. They even, when they worship it, call it by the name of the Lord. The intentions of the Israelites was to worship the true God, but their, ignorance, impatience and prioritising convenience caused them to worship a false God. (Exodus 32)
The god of your convenience is not the true God!
We have painted the standards of God as unsustainable in the world we’re living in, as though God is not the same today as He was then. So we pick and choose where we can and can’t conform to God, and negotiate how God will accept us in the areas we’re unwilling to change.
We are looking for expressions of God that will permit us to continue to live in our sin and be okay with it. False prophets, come about because they are feeding what people want to hear.
'For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. '
II Timothy 4:3-4
The harsh reality is there is no compromise in Christ. While God gives us all free will, once we choose Him the only option is His way. We call the standard of God radical, and say Christians who hold themselves to that stardad are ‘doing the most’, but it is the only way.
If we choose to follow God, we must follow the true God and not the god of our convenience. Every act of rebellion, disobedience and compromise is as witchcraft in the eyes of the Lord. It may feel minor or inconsequential to you, but whose standard are you living by. God cares about your language, your lifestyle, your fashion, your friends, your hobbies and your work, He cares about it all. Anything that doesn’t glorify, offends!
Which God are you following?