Last night I was awakened after midnight with a phone call. It was my daughter, who was in her room. She told me that someone in a Hutto neighborhood was throwing away a 42″ flat screen tv and had set it out with their trash. She said that she and her friends saw it as they were leaving a “Backyard Bible Club” she was helping lead. One of her friends asked the owner, “Does this tv work?” They were told that it did. This guy had to move suddenly and had to get rid of a bunch of stuff.
I asked my daughter why she didn’t tell me this at 9pm when I picked her up from that church. We could have gone over there and picked up that free flat screen. “I forgot,” she apologized. She wanted me to know about this and wanted to go if I was going to check it out. I was basically asleep and braindead, and I said no.
After I thought about it, I figured it was probably gone by now; but it might haunt me if I didn’t check it out. So I got dressed slowly in my half-asleep state and grabbed my keys. I told my daughter I was going and she came with me. We drove over to the neighborhood and found the house with lots of stuff by the curb. It wasn’t there, though. Someone else – perhaps one of the crew that heard about it being a working tv set – had come by and taken it. It was a wasted trip. But at least I wouldn’t have to wonder.
I feel kind of ashamed, though. It was greed for a free tv that got me up out of bed in the middle of the night. I thought of the night back in 1983 that I asked for (and received) the Holy Spirit. It’s a theological term called “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” talked about in Luke 3:16. My friend, who laid hands on me and prayed for me to receive what Jesus promised His Father would always give to those of His children that asked, asked me something about why I wanted this.
My response wasn’t planned and it was interesting. It kind of surprised me. I kind of felt like I was enlisting in the army of God.
Stop. Time-out. Here’s where non-believers get real nervous. “Army? Military? Violence?!” Some people actually hear language like this and think that religion would make me harm someone. I can’t blame them, really. I mean, there’s been a few nutcases out there that have made an idea like this not too far of a reach. But those of us who believe laugh at the notion. We understand the language that the bible uses often about spiritual warfare. We have fallen in love with Jesus, Who was the Prince of Peace. We were given a new nature – one that inherently loves people and treats them all as if they were more important than ourselves. This new nature makes it natural for us to be humble and gentle. It makes even the most menacing biker dude a tiny little baby of emotion – willing to lay his life down for someone that was defenseless or weaker. So, while the non-believer may not be able to fathom this, it is true. Waging war against people in the name of Christianity is silly.
War is part of this earth we live in, though. And the military is something that is in pretty much every society – especially the one in which the New Testament was written in (a Roman occupied territory) – so using military terms as similies and metaphors helps communicate understandable principles and points.
So, anyway, when I asked God for His Holy Spirit to empower me, I felt like I was committing to being His tool and being “on call” for Him to ask me to do anything – even if that meant getting in my car in the middle of the night to bring someone a gallon of milk or something. I felt like I was signing up to be obedient to His calling, which might ask me to do something for someone else that wasn’t exactly convenient.
I remember the heart that I had back then. How I was willing to do stuff that I felt like He was calling me to do. I was kind of sensitive to the voice of God. And here I was getting up in the middle of the night to do something inconvenient. But it was more in the name of greed than the name of God.
What a difference. I suck. I’m ashamed. What a drag. I want the heart of a willing servant. Not a self-serving jerk.
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