Omn-impotence? Get Convinced

Right now… I’m in the hospital for chemo. From what I hear this could be my last treatment, and so I’m happy about that. I’ll get new scans done in probably a week or two. The doc had talked about putting me on a pill after this treatment. So we shall see.

Here is my favorite part about being in the hospital… Ready? I love how they wake me up like 3 times in the morning before 8am. The best part about it is that 2 out of 3 people who woke me up this morning woke me up to tell me that they were going to just let me sleep so they’ll be back later to talk to me. I don’t know what else to say about that… The 3rd person that woke me up needed to weigh me. I’ve been here enough to know that they didn’t need to weigh me right then. I’m not upset about it all. I just thought maybe someone would think it’s kind of funny.

When I did finally wake up, I preached a pretty good sermon to my hospital room. No one was here, and it wasn’t out loud. Does anyone else do that? I don’t all the time, but sometimes I do. I had a good one going on the drive down here yesterday. Maybe that’s a little crazy, but I’m ok with it. It gets me pretty hyped up most of the time… I think God talks to me through these things. At least it feels a lot like it. This morning, I got going about the world. I was thinking about atheists and people who claim God, but mainly live like atheists too. Anyone can say whatever they want, but when it comes time to make decisions and live and get practical… there’s doesn’t seem to be an abundance of faith going on. Bill Johnson calls it practical atheism. So for a while, I thought people need to just have faith and stop sinning like sinners. That would fix it right? They need to just straighten up and grow up and stop being rebellious. They should trust God without seeing His power ever and without feeling His love in a real way… …ya know what? For that to happen… for someone to develop a life-changing, spirit-shifting, mountain-moving faith without ever encountering God… to me, that’d be a bigger miracle than the creation of the universe. Maybe I sound too extreme, but since I don’t hear any complaints right now… I’ll go on.

**Insertion: About 4 hours after I put this post up, I read someone’s “religious views” on facebook that I thought were interesting and worth including. It said, “The world could certainly use some miracles. Until then I’ll put my faith in human beings.” End Insertion**

I truly truly believe that mostly everyone in the world really wants God to be real. More people than we’d ever think have heard about the God who parted an ocean and emboldened a boy to kill a giant. Most people know about a Jesus who told crippled men to walk (and they did), who healed blind eyes and opened deaf ears. Ya know something else… most people don’t have any complaints or bad things to say about Jesus himself. There’s lots of stuff you hear against the church, but talk to a nonbeliever about Jesus sometime and see what they think of Him. Most people, in my opinion, desperately want a savior for REAL. They want a passionate God who desires to love them like everyone wants to be loved. They desire a powerful God whose power is a lot stronger than just having the ability to let us not sin as often. I think God wants the world to see that He really is what they’re looking for. The tricky thing here is that it would seem God has chosen to display Himself through us, so that we can lead people to Him and hope in Him after we’ve been drawn to that hope ourselves. I think He does this through us even though we bumble around a lot of times and seem to mess up because He’s more interested in working with us as opposed to getting the job done. Maybe we have a tough time getting this in our culture which is performance oriented and it’s all about what we do as opposed to having something to do while we spend time with the one(s) we love. Me and my savior are now Team Leesus. If that offends you, pretend I’m joking. …it’s all His idea, not mine as far as I see it.

I think this results-oriented mindset can give us a case of omn-impotence. Don’t worry, I’ll explain. It seems that a lot of times our views on the sovereignty of God can get us in trouble. God is omnipotent (all-powerful). He does what He pleases and no force could ever oppose Him or hold Him down. This is true… but what does a God do with such power? Does He do what we’d do if we had it? His ways are not our ways. Don’t get me wrong, I know He wants to move in our world. Sometimes, however, we pray for something once and due to the fact that we know nothing is stopping God, we decide that since He didn’t do it, He must not really want to. I don’t think that this is faith. I’ve learned recently the power there is in becoming convinced of things that the Lord has spoken regardless of what it looks like or if you go for a long time without seeing them happen. Contending for something that you know is right without it seeming to be getting closer seems stupid… usually great faith does seem stupid though. The actions taken by most heroes in the bible would be considered dumb if we didn’t know the latter half of the story. Even if we take a step of faith and seem to blow it… It’s still a demonstration of faith, which is something that pleases God. Isn’t that what we want anyways? So the definition of impotence is: unable to take effective action; helpless or powerless. It might sound weird, but I think that sometimes our views on how the omnipotence of God should work seems to render us powerless/helpless because results are more important than us stepping on fear while running in faith that runs a risk of us looking foolish. When we decide as a people to stop moving in faith because God should just do it when we say amen after a faithless OR faith-filled prayer, we have resigned ourselves to never moving in power, and we just gave up our ability to show the world a Kingdom that is what they want. We are now unable to take effective action… we’re helpless and powerless… we’re impotent in a sense. Hence the word ‘omn-impotence’.

Let’s just get convinced that God’s wonderful and not go there… Let’s get convinced beyond our hurts that have come from feeling forsaken and forgotten and wrong about His marvelous light. He’s good I promise!

~ by leemyers on May 13, 2008.