Monday, September 26, 2016

"Are You A Criminal?"

Pastor Kevin said something the other Sunday that really got me thinking. Too often we hear stories from the Bible and it kind of passes in one ear and out the other because we've heard it so many times. Yet when that story is told in just a slightly different way it can have a whole new sense of meaning.

Like the story from that Sunday. Abram pulling up his tent poles and leaving for a new land. No biggie, it's a story they tell in Sunday School to five year olds. Nothing new. But there was something in the way I heard it that morning. The idea of just packing up and leaving without an explanation in a hurry.

All I could think about was the one time I really experienced this. It was the middle of the night and the people down the hall from me were moving out. It was the last day of the month and I just thought they were waiting until the last second to get out since they paid their rent. But no, they were skipping out on rent. They were trying to get out of their contract and disappear, as I found out talking to our building manager the next day.

So when Abram decided to leave last second with no warning and in a hurry, what do you think his neighbors thought? He couldn't even have said anything about God speaking to him, this was before Judaism or any formal religion. Even with the thousands of years of "church" if you say Jesus told you to do something today you still get weird looks, how do you think they would have looked at him then?

There's only one reason I can think of someone moving in a real hurry and not wanting to explain it.

Are you willing to let people look at you like that if God asks you to do something...?

T

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