Moving Day

Today I drove down to Casa Grande this morning to help my brother-in-law move to a new house. I realized a couple of important things....first, I am not as young as I use to be and my body hurts tonight. Second, strangely, I began to think about the concept of moving or being displaced in the Bible. I thought about the call that Jesus put on the disciples to "follow him". They dropped what they were doing (their careers) and made an incredible no holds bar commitment to do something totally different than what their lives were like. They moved from their comfortable lives and began to live a very challenging uncomfortable life.

How many of us are willing to do the same thing in our commitment to Jesus? After Pastor Dan's sermon last week I was struck by how much of an "entitlement" attitude we have. We somehow think that we are given the right to live a certain way because we live in a great country. We have a right to a nice house, car, job and other things that make life comfortable. But what I read over and over again is Jesus calling us to sacrifice and surrender....giving up all entitlements and "moving" to a new station in life-of surrender and sacrafice. What we have mistaken as a call of provide comfort is not what Jesus talks about at all. If anything our faith should make us very uncomfortable. Our faith should be like that of the early disciples which was risk-taking and brash. It flew in the face of the local politicians and religious leaders.

Of course I have a new perspective on all of this having myself moved to a new country and home in Rwanda. It has given me a new way of looking at life. I look at the children in our neighborhood and I realize that they didn't choose to be born into poverty. Aren't they entitled to the same possibilities in life that I have: job, house, family? How is it that just by where you are born comes God-given rights and opportunities? It doesn't seem fair.

So moving or relocating has become part of our commitment as Christ followers. As Jesus called the first 12 disciples to a commitment that required mobility he called Andria and I to that same path. It's a call to bring the gospel of hope and joy to people that need a little extra of those things today. It's about sharing the blessings that we enjoy in the States to people who haven't experienced those blessings. I think of Abraham who moved across the earth and was called to be a blessing to those he encountered because God first blessed him.

Radical commitment in the Bible always was risky and it should be today. A radical commitment to Jesus should cause us to want to move and to share the blessings that God has given us. It should cause people around us to question our sanity and should be some of the wildest, risk-taking behavior that people have ever seen. We have lost our moving ability because we have sanitized our faith to a nice neat package that shows itself only in Sunday worship at 10am. Let's get out and move!