Being practical

Have been busy. Went out to the west side twice this week, picked up a table and another night getting a dishwasher. Put it in yesterday. Nice job too, centered, level, looks great, dumps water onto the floor like crazy. The warranty people will look at it tomorrow.

The ways of God verses Americana.

Another quote from Bradley Heath and his book Millstones and Stumbling Blocks. Pg67

"…American culture has an insidious and pervasive influence because no matter how ascetic or monastic we may be, we all inhale it like secondhand smoke…"

I know that I have been neither monastic or ascetic when it came to our culture. Now I am. But my loaf has already been leavened by Americana for a long time now. He continues.

"For example , many evangelicals adopt the current cultural mentality of victimhood. We embrace an entitlement mentality and whine about the stealing of America: “Its not fair! We have rights: this is a Christian nation” but nothing has been stolen from us – not our government, not our schools, not our culture, not our families, not our Church’s and not our freedoms. We have simply surrendered these things by retreating from biblical thinking in our failure to love God with all our minds. There has been no theft or seizure: secularism and its minions have merely occupied ground Christians have deserted."

So as we get saved and try to walk out our faith in God we have all these old ways of thinking from our American culture to deal with and here is one of them. If Americans are anything, we are a pragmatic people, a practical people.

We have been inculcated with the idea that being practical is reasonable, normal, why its rational thinking. Pragmatism was soaked into most of our bones from gov’t schools, TV, movies, and pop music and yes even our families. Unfortunately getting saved doesn’t flush it out of us either.

I have this little fold out pamphlet on 21 names of God and their meanings. God has many different names in the bible. But practical, reasonable, and pragmatic are not among them. He is not the practical God . There is nothing about him that is pragmatic. But he does say "come let us reason together". Always on his terms, by his definitions because it is his world.

So at our core as Americans, we think pragmatically , we go with what works, with what makes sense. But if we are saved, we now serve a principled God. Who in Malachi said “I am the Lord thy God who changeth not”. Now this is a train wreck waiting to happen.

Or it has happened. Maybe it has happened lots and lots of times and we just didn’t realize it. Maybe God isn’t impressed by our reasonableness. As in the garden, he expects obedience.

Today Uzzah’s untimely death when he grabbed the Arc came up in our service. Modern Christians today would declare a prayer and fast over something like that. Then we would go on out and grab the Arc again. Because we love the Lord in our hearts, the very last thing we tend to think of is, maybe we are not being obedient.

But America is where it is today because the believers have not been obedient. Its like a flood now, all of the ways over the years where I can now see how the church was being practical. What we did, all made sense. It just wasn’t obedient.