Excerpt from:
Meditations for Misfits: Finding Your
Place in the Family of God
Reckless Abandon to God
Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.
—Oswald Chambers
A while back I spent several years hanging around the edges of a particular revival movement. It doesn’t matter which one, because they’re all essentially the same despite their differences: The Spirit manifests Himself in a certain manner, shaking things up a bit, and then the Spirit changes the way He operates. Somehow, the leadership doesn’t always get this, so they keep the revival propped up long after the Spirit has altered the program, and anyone who begins to head off in a different direction ranks maybe one rung higher than an infidel.
When I began to step away from this particular movement—which was not a long walk to begin with—the diehards started in on me: “What about the move of God? How can you walk away like that?” Pretty easily, as it turned out, because God was leading me in such a different direction that to remain where I was would have amounted to an act of defiance. The diehards had turned their experience into a principle, their own personal doctrine. Without realizing it, they were trying to prevent God from being as original with me as He had been with them.
I don’t blame them, really. When you’ve seen God work in a powerful way, it’s difficult to keep a balanced perspective. I imagine the blind man of Bethsaida in Mark 8 faced some momentary temptation to turn his healing experience into a doctrine; from his perspective, sight would be restored if Jesus spit on your eyes. That indeed was an original method of healing, one that Jesus used on only three recorded occasions. Had He done that today, some marketing genius undoubtedly would have tried to turn it into a product, not a principle. Not a pleasant thought.
I confess that I’ve been guilty of expecting God to work in someone else’s life the way He worked in mine. I suppose that’s understandable; it’s all too easy to feel threatened by God’s originality with others. If God is telling my friend to ch
uck it all and head for the mission field because the time is growing short, then I’ve got to wonder why He’s telling me to stay put. Or if people are getting healed all over the place at some wild charismatic meetings, I wonder if He’s really leading me to a time of contemplative prayer as I battle the flu. I’m sure I would feel a whole lot more secure if I could get my friend to stay home from the mission field and convince the charismatics to contemplate their way to healing. It’s always come as a shock when I’ve realized that God’s main concern is not making sure I feel secure.
Originality is what keeps us on the fringes, but it’s also what we need to fight for. And we can’t very well do that if we’re undermining God’s unique activity in another person’s life. If we feel called to serve God with “reckless abandon”—another Oswald Chambers phrase—we need to give our fellow believers the freedom to do the same. Our artificially manufactured principles can only get in their way.
Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.—Romans 15:7 NIV
Lord, let me be recklessly abandoned to You, allowing You to be original not only with me but also with those whose calling bears the marks of Your unique touch.
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