SHIFTING CONTAINERS – A Series On Building Capacity

As Christians we need to be transformed with an ever-increasing capacity to develop a Christ consciousness.  We need to be discontent to live a life of spiritual smallness, satisfied to fill our “small containers” week after week without any desire to obtain “bigger containers” and increase our capacity.  We need to use this season to start shifting containers!

We need to pursue lives of expanded capabilities to receive, absorb, and contain as much of Christ as possible.  And what we are able to ‘take in’ will eventually determine what we are able to ‘pour out’.   The larger our capacity to be intimate with Christ, the more we will have the ability to reflect Christ and influence society.

During a visit to the Middle East in 2018, after visiting refugee camps in Lebanon and meeting several Christian leaders from different regions in Syria, my faith was deeply challenged.  Like the apostles I cried out to God: “Increase my capacity O Lord. (Luke 17:5) Help me to look beyond the obvious and lead me into the significant.  Enlarge my spiritual capacity and my ability to look through Your eyes.  Instill in me an understanding that seeks the redemptive when I look at the destructive.  Develop my capacity to respond O Lord.”

From all that I witnessed, learned and desired a book was born:  CAPACITY – but little did I realise that the book would only see its full value 2 years later during an unforeseen pandemic that will change the world as we know it forever.  This season of uncertainty, infections, fear, and death demands a capacity-changing-expansion of faith.  We cannot apply the same expression of our faith in a world that is now far removed from the one we entered on 1 January 2020.  It has to be new, fresher and bigger.  If we end 2020 the same way we started 2020, from a spiritual perspective, then we have truly not learned anything.  Then it was indeed, as Winston Churchill said:  “a crisis wasted”.

Christians who enjoy the luxury of freedom tend to focus more on developing solid theologies and a firm Biblical knowledge than putting some skin in the game.  Topics that are far removed from their experience, ranging from persecution, refugees, suffering, human rights abuses, modern-day slavery, and any topic you can talk about, are explored, discussed, theologised and then placed in a box and safely put away as another theological conquest.  We obtain a full grasp of the theology of suffering, even becoming experts in the field of persecution, without ever-increasing our capacity to understand these theologies from an intimate, sacrificial, and personal experiential level.  We attend seminars and conferences on persecution in luxury hotels, willing to fill our “containers” with knowledge but not willing to shift the containers outside our safety and comfort.  We enjoy and preserve our freedom while speaking on subjects that increase knowledge but not capacity.  The shallowness and superficiality of such spiritual capacity is tragic as we cheapen the sacrificial by emphasising the easy, the quick, and the glamorous avenue of filling up with content.

So, for the next 10 Sundays I would like to explore (mostly for myself) the following areas that would need to reflect an increase in capacity:

• SPIRITUAL CAPACITY — the need to move from a transactional faith to a transformational faith.
• PERCEPTUAL CAPACITY —the need to change our glasses and the way we perceive the pandemic.
• SOCIAL CAPACITY —the need to consolidate our friendships and relationships
• INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY —the need to swop our shoes and adopt a scout mentality.
• MENTAL CAPACITY —the need to modify our thinking.
• EMOTIONAL CAPACITY —the need to align our affections with the non-negotiables of Christ.
• BEHAVIOURAL CAPACITY —the need to restructure our actions.
• RISK CAPACITY —the need to confront our fears.
• CHARITABLE CAPACITY — the need to change our way of giving.
• STAMINA CAPACITY —the need to tighten our grip, increase our spiritual stamina, create new habits, transform our life-styles, acquire godly virtues, and ultimately grow into full maturity.

My prayer as we journey together is that along this journey to God, the self that BEGINS will not be the self that ARRIVES.

You are most welcome to order the book CAPACITY from Mike at thirdwayinfo@gmail.com