Caged Christians

A special thanks to my dear sis in Christ, Cario Stewart, for forwarding this link to me!! Man!! I love this post by Mark Batterson:

The last chase the lion evotional is going out this week. For a free subscription you can sign-up @ theaterchurch.com/evotional. Just thought I'd share an evotional excerpt.

Caged Christians

A few months ago I was in the Galapagos Islands on a mission trip. It almost felt like we were flying into the Garden of Eden. The Galapagos are like a zoo with no cages! And I'm not sure how to say it, but there was something so exhillirating about seeing a wild animal in its natural habitat.

It's one thing to see a caged bird. It's an altogether different thing to see a blue-footed booby circling about 100 feet up in the air and dive-bombing ten feet into the ocean and catching a fish two feet from your boat.

It's one thing seeing a dolphin show in a manmade pool. It is an altogether different thing swimming with sea lions or walking a beach at night with dozens of sea lions barking at you and chasing you.

We were surrounded by 250 year-old tortoises, beautiful marine iguanas, and pelicans that looked pre-historic. And what made it so amazing was that there weren't any cages!

So after returning from the Galapagos we took our kids to the zoo and it wasn't the same. I'm ruined for zoos! I love zoos, but it's just not the same seeing a caged animal. It's too safe. It's too controlled. So we were walking through the ape house and I had this thought as I looked at a caged gorilla: I wonder if churches do to people what zoos do to animals.

We take something that is wild and we domesticate it. And we put it in a cage called church for easy observation. We remove the danger. We remove the risk. And the end result is a caged Christian. Nice to look at. But I just don't think that was the original idea. Jesus handpicked a dozen disciples who were about as uncultured and undomesticated as you can get! And He unleashed them!

In fact, he used a zoological metaphor in Matthew 10:16 when he sent them out on their inaugural mission: "I am sending you like sheep among wolves."

Imagine a zookeeper putting a bunch of sheep in the wolf cage. That is what Jesus says he is doing. And that's why he tells them they need to be innocent as doves and shrewd as snakes. Jesus doesn't shelter them. He plops in the middle of a wolf pack!

The goal of church isn't to take people out of their natural habitat and domesticate them--make them look like and talk like and act like Christians. When we pronounce the benediction at the end of the service we're releasing people back into the wild. And they go back into their natural habitat as an ambassador of God's grace.

I love the way Erwin McManus says it in his book Unstoppable Force: The center of God's will is not a safe place but the most dangerous place in the world. To live outside of God's will puts us in danger; to live in his will makes us dangerous.

Unleash the lion chaser within!