“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done,
It doesn’t matter what you’ve done,
What effect is without a cause?
It doesn’t matter what you’ve done.
Now lay your faithless head down
In necessities Cotton Hand,
There’s a love that never changes,
No matter what you’ve done. “
At one
point in my life, I met a lot of people that I never would have expected to be
changing the world in the way they were doing it. A former gang member turned
pastor, working with people that he used to call family, trying to help them find a way out. Or an
old junkie that just can’t seem to be set free from his addiction becomes a
slave to righteousness and helps others find the same path. A girl struggling
with depression figures out that even though life sucks a lot of the time, it
has a purpose, and she strives to help others find their purpose right alongside her. At one point in my life, I very ignorantly came to the conclusion that
these kinds of people were the last kind of people I would expect to see become
a part of the Body of Christ.
I expressed
my amazement that I had at the transformation in these people’s lives to
somebody I look up to a lot, and his response was this: “If we read the
Gospels, really read them, enjoy the stories and think of the characters, those
people are exactly who we should expect to find Jesus. Where did we miss this?.”
Those words
really resonated with me at the time that he shared them, but they soon lost
their value when I entered into a different context with different problems. I’m finding that there are plenty of things in life that I
need to be willing to re-learn, and come to grips with the fact that I will
never understand what it means to its fullest extent. This is one of them.
Church is
its own culture. There are social norms that are different for each one. In
some, you can drop an f-bomb here and there and nobody will bat an eye. In
others, if you don’t carry the right translation of the Bible with you into the
building, then you can’t possibly know who Jesus is. I’m not saying that either
of those is right or wrong. What I’m suggesting is, maybe our priorities fall
into the wrong places too easily.
The lyrics
above are from a song called “Allah, Allah, Allah” by a band called
mewithoutYou. The first verse says:
In everywhere we
look,
In everywhere we
look,
In everywhere we
look,
In everywhere we
look,
In everywhere we
look,
In everywhere we
look,
Allah, Allah, Allah
In everywhere we
look.
I can
listen to that song and think about the fact that it says Allah instead of
Jesus or even just God and be upset about it. I can listen to this song and get
frustrated because I thought there was finally a group of decently normal
Christian guys writing music that’s honest and true, but now because they
talked about Allah in one of their songs I can come to the conclusion that they
must not be Christians anymore.
I hope you picked up on that sarcasm in the above paragraph, because even though I can
choose to do those things, I find that when I stand in a room full of a bunch of sweaty
people who are just as lost and broken as I am, it is only then that I come to
a real understanding of the beauty and truth that are in a song like that. When
hundreds of people join together in singing that one song, whether they know it
or not, they are being led in a ballad to their Creator, and he can use that
ballad to speak truth into their lives in any way he wants.
To say that
it’s extra inspirational when God saves a prostitute isn’t fair, or to say that
a song or idea needs to be deemed un-Christian because it takes truth that is
also found in other great teachers is very narrow minded. For me personally,
all it means is that my God isn’t big enough to break through barriers set up
by Satan and the world around us, and if that’s my attitude towards things,
then my war is over before it even starts.
My whole
point?
Maybe God
is a lot bigger than we let him be, but I’m not sure if we’ll find out if we keep him in a box that isn’t
even big enough to fit my pet lizard.
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