Please be aware that in this post I am not attempting to be some sort of guru or "wise" spiritual leader, leading the unwashed masses out of their abysmal ignorance to heights of glory that only I now know. No, I am not the only person in the world who has a keen awareness of what God wants. There are many of us. And I must say that all who follow Christ are a washed, saved people. We all belong to God. Nevertheless our sense of who and what God is, is underdeveloped. We talk rapturously about our great and good God, which we should do, but we have such a childish (not childlike, which would be good) sense of who God really is and how He thinks and operates.
We seem to assume, without serious thought, that God operates optimally in a scenario of frenetic activity and loud sound. God can no doubt work in these conditions – He is, after all, GOD – but He neither needs nor prefers such circumstances in which to show His power and glory.
We preach and teach often about Elijah's experience on Mt. Horeb (1 Kings 19.9-18), in which he saw the Lord's power in the wind and the earthquake and the fire. But scripture tells us that the Lord was not in the wind, earthquake or the fire. That the Lord was not "in" these cataclysmic events indicates that God chose not to speak through them to Elijah. After all the sound and fury, God spoke to Elijah in a "still small voice." That is, God spoke within Elijah's thoughts, and it was very effective.
God wants, in addition to the aforementioned conditions of great movement and loud praise, a sober, quiet moment before Him, in which we see who He really is and what He really wants from us. We Pentecostals like to quote our Pentecostal catch phrases and quote our own Pentecostal jargon, which is not too bad. But doing this does not put any more stars in our crown. In fact, we utter some of our pet sayings without giving a thought to what we are actually saying. It's what our brothers and sisters expect us to say.
What we need are great hearts, hearts of depth so that we will think soberly and long about this Almighty God of all creation, this tremendous God we serve. If we do this, we will realize we have trivialized God and tried to squeeze His uncontainable Spirit into our own severely restricted mold.
Set God free! Broaden your mental and spiritual horizons. Is He a God who is only near at hand and not far off, filling every conceivable nook and cranny of space and existence? (Jer. 23.23) We are, in a sense, stifling the Almighty Spirit; we are reducing Him to our own stunted stature, and that limits Him in what He can do for us. Give wings to your faith and set God free!
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