normal

Our church is hosting an event from the 22nd-25th. It is called The Thirst Conference. Each evening we will gather together for worship, teaching, and drinking richly from God's Spirit. The purpose of the conference is to expose the many things we hunger and thirst after instead of God. We like to convince ourselves we're aren't as bad off as we actually are. In general, we take ourselves way too seriously while not taking God seriously enough. We put God wherever we can fit Him on our priority list. We run to all sorts of broken cisterns (Jeremiah 2:13) hoping they will satisfy our longings and desires when they repeatedly fail to hold anything. We mar the beauty of the gospel in our attempts to use God for our glory. We do enough of what we think we should (read, pray, attend church, serve, etc.) thinking it somehow obligates God to bless us. We are Israel thousands of years later.

I struggled with this mightily upon my return from India. Eventually it subsided as I allowed myself to be swept away in the current of the mundane. Recently God has been showing me my drifting back into the land of the sleeping and/or dead. With all my heart, I want to be as far from that place as possible. And I believe God's Word shows us the only way to avoid it is to hunger and thirst after God alone.

My sister's blog is called Fig Tree Freedom. She altered her design a bit recently, and I reread her original purpose for the blog. As she says, Jesus came to curse the normal. My life is normal. I am as much distracted by the drifting currents of this world as any unbeliever. I am a fig tree not producing figs in the off-season. My goals echo the goals of every other human being, except I claim a hope when all is said and done. That is not my calling. We are not called to live like every one else, but be different from everyone else because of the hope we have in Christ. Christ saved me from the world in order to live against the world for the sake of the world.

If you are in the area over the course of next week I encourage you to come out to the conference. Join a local gathering of God's people desperate for His Spirit to pull us out of normality and into transformed living for the glory of His name.

I am going to use this week to allow God's Word to flood me with truths about my need to thirst and long for Him. I should be doing it each and every day, and I pray it will take root in my heart.

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!

My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

~Psalm 84:1-2, 10

Now what is normal about that?