As he (Jesus) said this, he called out, “The one who has ears to hear had better listen!” (Luke 8:8)
Woe to the over churched. That was me. God saw me sitting in the pew and breathed a razor-sharp message into my pastor’s sermon. The words flew from the pulpit, hit my eardrum, and bounced onto the floor.
I’d been practicing A.S.D. (Auditory Selective Dullness) for years. Raised in the pews, the effervescent words of life were poured over me before they had meaning. Jesus is the blah, and the blah, blah, blah. It’s a malady I fight today.
As I got older, I determined God was for those who shrink from life. I strained for the highest numbers on the fun-o-meter. But such living never brought joy. My truest desires weren’t greeted at the door, let alone invited into satisfaction.
Behind the temporal games, I hid a longing to touch the Progenitor of life. I wondered if the enormous life in Christ lay in grasping the true meaning behind all those churchy phrases—washed in the blood, dead to sin, sanctified by grace. They were so much white noise in a preoccupied head.
On one of those unfulfilled mornings I woke, and there beside me lay the instruments needed to open the tired phrases—a Bible, prayer, and a desperate heart. With the tools, I pried the trampled walnuts until they burst to reveal emeralds of hope, fire-blue sapphires of love, and diamonds of truth. Christ in me was no longer a ho-hum byline, it was my oxygen. The words were the same, but the power exploding out of them woke me from the stupor I’d called life.
From time to time, I still feel over churched, but then I crack open the old terminology for all the brilliant reality it will yield.
Prayer: Holy Spirit, dynamite my crusty heart with fresh understanding.