elevate July 7

on this holiday week/weekend I just wanted to talk randomly about a couple themes that seemed to be running through my head.

One is in the area of religion. The line between religion and relationship becomes more insidious the older I get. It used to be a clear definition in my head, there was religious people and there were those who had a great relationship with God. But as I've gotten older it's become obvious that you can become very religious about your relationship with God. Then my crazy head began to think that maybe most religious people started out with a great relationship in their excitement over how wonderful their relationship was the God they became religious in order to protect that relationship, and used programs and tradition in a miss informed attempt to help others develop a relationship with God. (That was a really long sentence, and I'm guessing it technically isn't a sentence)
in general religion seeks to separate. In this is where Satan wins so many battles because he uses Scripture to justify the separation. And people in a great relationship with God begin to divide over some of the silliest things. Some of these divisions are over being right, which sounds like an excellent thing to divide over but many times it is based on fear and pride and not out of love and honor. We divide over a fear that if we were wrong then we were wrong about everything so in pride we tell everyone else that they are wrong and if they were really were good students of Scripture they would agree with us.
Well more thoughts like these thoughts and many more like them are running around my brain right now.

The second thing that has been dominating my mind wanderings, is the idea that many people prefer someone else to be really close to God. I Picked this up on a recent study of Moses receiving the law. People didn't want to be too close to the mountain, they wanted Moses to be the one who spoke to God and relayed the message is to them. Got offered the opportunity for everyone to surround the mountain ,feel his presence and hear his voice, but they refuse and backed far away from the mountain. Then when they thought Moses was never going to return they built an idol, not really to replace God but to replace Moses. They wanted somebody else to intercede for them with God. They wanted something that wouldn't die on the mountain as they thought Moses had.
As I look back over my life I can see this ringing truer then I would prefer to admit. And although I have separated myself from an entire ministry that is built around the concept that the leaders were the close ones to God and all we had in do was obey them, even now I find myself at times apprehensive about just how powerful and life-changing a close relationship with God can be. It's tough sometimes to keep walking deeper and not compare myself to others and just be satisfied that I judge myself to be closer to God than they are, so let's just hold up here and get comfortable. It is tempting to come under the covering of a spiritual father and ultimately just let the spiritual father communicate to God for me and let me know what he thinks I should do next.

While these are my current ramblings,
I hope to see this Saturday at elevate, where maybe some of these ramblings will start to make sense.

:-)

Remember elevate begins at 6:30 p.m. with an awesome café, with coffee fruit and some form of cake . Programming begins at 7:00 p.m.