WARNING: This is a long post - read when you have time to really think through it. Just finished spending some quality time reading outside. It's always nice & quiet on Sunday mornings in the backyard. I like to take a cup of coffee out with me & sit in our lawn chairs under the tree and spend some time with God. I was reading a book that the boys (aka Andrea) bought me for Father's Day ... The Air I Breathe: Worship As a Way of Life by Louie Giglio. Excellent book written by the leader of the Passion movement. Anyway, Louie hit on a topic that I brought up Friday morning in a post about focusing too much on peripheral things in our lives with God ...

Standing before the men of Athens, Paul took a deep breath and unfolded the mystery that his listeners had been searching for. He spoke of "the God who made the world and all things in it." Paul identified Him as "Lord of heaven and earth." And this God, Paul said, "gives to all people life and breath and all things."

Men of Athens, meet the God of gods.

Turns out they were right all along. There was another God greater than all their idols, higher than all the objects inhabiting all their altars.

This God is powerful enough, Paul proclaimed, to invent the whole world and everything it contains. And He "does not dwell in temples made by hands, nor is He served by human hands as though He needed anything." Turns out God doesn't live at the church after all. By the very logic of His immensity, He refuses to be contained by any temple or structure.

What a shame, I guess we have to say good-bye to the admonition we often give kids who get too rowdy at church - "SHHHhhhhhh! You're in God's house." Do we really believe that, or is it just a clever threat, a last resort after we've long since counted to three and still can't get the kids to settle down?

It does make for a nice image, though. Can you see Him at the door after the service, greeting everyone? "Thanks for coming, appreciate you coming, thanks for being here, glad you made it, hope you enjoyed it. Was everything okay? God bless. Oh yeah, I'm God - so, just ... bless! Come back to see Me! Have a nice week!"

Is that God? Watching all the cars drive away, turning the church lights off, settling in for a long and quiet week, maybe playing a little on the organ, only to fling wide the doors again in seven days. "Hey! Glad you're back. ?Good to see you. Come on in!"

I don't think so. God doesn't have a church fetish. He probably cares less about the carpet color there than we think. Why? Because He's huge. Creator. Initiator of all things. Way too vast to be stuck in some building all week. Far too interested in our lives to simply watch us drive away from Him. Much more worthy of our time than just one hour of just one day.

If there is one thing that God has been teaching and showing me over the last year it is that I haven't even begun to figure Him out. I remember when I was in college, several months after I finally handed my life over to His leadership. I had finally completed my 'checklist' of bad habits that had been corrected. In my own eyes I was in as good a standing with God as I possibly could be. I remember asking myself, "Now what?" I thought, mistakenly, that I had reached some epic peak in my spiritual journey just because I had cleaned up some bad habits. These were only peripheral things that bore some weight and importance in my spiritual journey. I've come to know over the years that God desires so much more from me than simply correcting the bad habits of my life. God is bigger than that. I read this from Watchman Nee this morning ...

God is not out to reform our life. It is not His aim to bring that life to a certain stage of refinement, for it is on a totally wrong plane. On that plane He cannot now bring man to glory. He must have a new man; one born anew, born of God. Regeneration and justification go together.

What a freeing realization this has been to me! Instead of focusing on who I am (in respect to the things that I would like to change about myself), I choose to focus on who He has created me to be. Instead of worrying about the peripheral things of life, I choose to focus on the Core instead - God, Himself. My life is wrapped up as a son of God in the life of Christ Himself ("It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.") and the live I live is now in Him. My heart yearns to focus on that which is important to the heart of God - nothing more and nothing less. The difficult thing, then, is in discovering God's heart and aligning my heart with it. I guess that's my vision statement, as it were, for my life at this moment in time. It is a place on my journey with Him that I can truly say is "an adventure," as I described it to a friend this past week.